This, we are pained to say, is all changed now.  Our beloved dates, our easy explanation, and popular narrative are half dissolved under the touch of modern investigation.  Roman History abandons poor Romulus and Remus; the Flood sinks into a local inundation, and is pushed back nobody knows how many thousands of years; an Egyptian antiquity arises of which Herodotus never knew; and Josephus is proved ignorant of his own subject.  Nothing is found separate from the current of the world’s history,—­neither Hebrew law and religion, nor Phoenician commerce, nor Hindoo mythology, nor Grecian art.  On the shadowy Past, over the deserted battle-fields, the burial-mounds, the mausolea, the temples, the altars, and the habitations of perished nations, new rays of light are cast.  Peoples not heard of before, empires forgotten, conquests not recorded, arts unknown in their place at this day, and civilizations of which all has perished but the language, appear again.  The world wakes to find itself much older than it thought.  History is hardly the same study that it once was.  Even more than the investigations of hieroglyphs and bass-reliefs and sculptures, during the past few years, have the researches in one especial direction changed the face of the ancient world.

Language is found to be itself the best record of a nation’s origin, development, and relation to other races.  Each vocabulary and grammar of a dead nation is a Nineveh, rich in pictures, inscriptions, and historical records, uncovering to the patient investigator not merely the external life and actions of the people, but their deepest internal life, and their connection with other peoples and times.  The little defaced word, the cast-away root, the antique construction, picked up by the student among the vestiges of a language, may be a relic fresher from the past and older than a stone from the Pyramids, or the sculpture of the Assyrian temple.

In American history, this work of investigation till recently had not been thoroughly entered upon.  Within the last quarter of a century, Kingsborough and Gallatin and Prescott and Davis and Squier and Schoolcraft and Mueller have each thrown some light over the mysterious antiquity of our own continent.  But of all, a French Abbe, an ethnologist and a careful investigator,—­M.  Brasseur de Bourbourg,—­has, in a history recently published, done the best service to this cause.  It is entitled “Histoire des Nations Civilisees du Mexique et de l’Amerique Centrale.” (Paris, 1857.) M. de Bourbourg spent many years in Central America, studying the face of the country and the languages of the Indian tribes, and investigating the ancient picture-writing and the remains of the wonderful ruins of that region.  Probably no stranger has ever enjoyed better opportunities of reading the ancient manuscripts and studying the dialects of the Central American races.  With these helps he has prepared a groundwork for the history of the early