To what segment of time shall we assign the name of Nineteenth Century?  In A.D. 1800 there was dispute as to which was properly its first year, the question being settled in favor of 1801.  Having thus struck out the first of the eighteen hundreds, we may take the liberty of similarly ostracizing the last twenty-four or twenty-five, which are yet to come, and start the nineteenth century as far back in the eighteenth.  If we look farther behind us, the centuries will be found often to overlap in this way.  Coming events cast their shadows before, and the morning twilight of the new age is refracted deeply into the sky of the old one.  Of no case can this be more truly said than of that in point.  Not only America, but Christendom, may safely date the century’s commencement about 1775 or 1776.  The narrowest isthmus between the mains of past and present will cover those years.

England and France were then both at the outset of a new political era, sharply divided from that preceding.  The amiable and decorous Louis XVI., with his lovely consort, had just ousted from Versailles the Du Barrys and the Maupeons.  George III., a sovereign similar in youth and respectability of character, had a few years before in like manner improved the tone of the English court, and, after the first flush of welcome from his subjects, surprised and delighted to have an Englishman and a gentleman once more upon the throne, was getting over his early lessons in adversity from the birch of Wilkes and Junius, and entering upon a second series from that of Washington, all preparatory to the longest and most brilliant reign in British annals.  Frederick ii. was an old man, occupied with assuring to the power he had created the position it now holds as the first in Europe.  Clive, in the House of Lords, was nursing a still younger bantling, now an empire twice as populous as Europe was at that period.  Under the equally rugged hand of the young princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, Russia was having her Mongolian epidermis indued with the varnish Napoleon so signally failed to scrape off, and was for the first time taking a place among the great powers of the West.  The curtain, in short, was in the act of rising on the Europe of to-day.  Anson had lately brought the Pacific to light, and Cook was completing his work.  The crust of Spanish monopoly in the trade of four-fifths of the North and South American coasts had been broken, and England was preparing to replace it, at some points, by her own.  This was, of itself, a New World, geographical and commercial.

Under Linnaeus and Buffon, another world, wider still, was unfolding its wonders and subjecting them to a classification which has since been but little changed, vast as have been the subsequent accessions of knowledge and attainments in methods of interpretation.  Before them, the study of the organic creation can scarcely be said to have existed.  The inorganic was as little reduced to system, and in its broadest