are comparatively hidden, and the broken character of the land, intersected by mountains in every direction, renders his investigation still more difficult.  Of course, when I speak of the geological deposits as so completely unveiled to us here, I do not forget the sheet of drift which covers the continent from North to South, and which we shall discuss hereafter, when I reach that part of my subject.  But the drift is only a superficial and recent addition to the soil, resting loosely above the other geological deposits, and arising, as we shall see, from very different causes.

In this article I have intended to limit myself to a general sketch of the formation of the Laurentian Hills with the Azoic stratified beds resting against them.  In the Silurian epoch following the Azoic we have the first beach on which any life stirred; it extended along the base of the Azoic beds, widening by its extensive deposits the narrow strip of land already upheaved.  I propose in my next article to invite my readers to a stroll with me along that beach.

* * * * *

PERICLES AND PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

Ancient history is forever indispensable to the speculative historian.  The ground of its value is the very fact of its antiquity; by which we mean, not simply distance in time, but distance as the result of separate construction,—­distance as between two systems of reality, each orbicularly distinct from the other.  One system—­that with which our destiny is concurrent—­is still flying its rounds in space; the other has whirled itself out of space, and through a maze of scattered myths and records, into human remembrances.  This latter system, though hermetically sealed to the realities of outward existence, still, and by this very exclusion from all practical uses, becomes of paramount interest to the philosophic historian; indeed, it is only because the shadowy planets of the ancient cycle still repeat their revolutions in human thought, that the philosophy of history is at all possible.  Philosophy, in its ideal pretensions, frequently forgets its material conditions:  it claims for itself the power of constructing wholes in thought where only parts have been given in reality, as if, dispensing with material supports, it could bridge over a chasm in Nature.  And so it seems to do, but so in fact it never does; it never builds but on models; it never in any system gives ideal completeness, until a real completeness is furnished, either through this system or some other that is analogous.  There can, therefore, be no speculative anticipation in history, save as it makes its way into the blank future along the line of diagrams furnished by the past; the splendid composition, in our thoughts, of realities as yet undeveloped, is set up in the skeleton types left us of realities that not only have themselves been accomplished, but which belong to a system that is concluded.