Modern Discoveries: Shall we have another Deluge? [pp. 545-557]

MODERN DISCOVERIES.
mind, which is unquenchable. There is also a fascination, a breadth
of romance, about those tropical lands, with
"Larger constellations burning, mellow morns and -happy skies,
Breadth of tropic shade, and palms in cluster-knots of Paradise."
where
"Droops the heavy blossomed bower, hangs the heavy fruited tree Summer isles of Eden, lying in dark-purple spheres of sea;"
which few can resist, but many, we fear will find a nearer view
dispel their pleasing illusions, anld be led to exclaim with the
poet:
"Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay I"
ART. VI.-IODERN DISCOVERIES.-SHALL WE HAYE ANOTHIIER
DELUGE?
The face of places and their forms decay,
And that is solid earth which once was sea,
Seas in their turn retreating from the shore,
Make solid land where ocean was before,
And far from strands are shells of fishes found,
And rusty anchors found on mnountain ground,
And what were fields before, now washed and worn
By falling floods, from heights to valleys turn.-OvID.
THIus wrote Ovid, two thousand years ago-a period which this
enlightened, restless and egotistical age looks upon as darkly wrapped in a state of blissful ignorance. And yet what more, with all
our enlightenment, have we learned of the system of nature, than
what Ovid discloses in the above verses?
If from a strata of earth are dug skulls which have lain there
thousands of years, anid which naturalists proclaim to indicate the
same degree of intellectual development as the skulls buried yesterday, what mental progress can we lay claim to?'Tis true knowledge at present may be more diffused, more wide-spread, but, perhaps, more shallow on that account. We have heard it said that
some of the old philosophers held the theory that intellectuality, like
more material things, was extended to man in a given quantity, that
as it diffused itself over the masses it became shallow, of little depth;
that there are periods when this diffusion is less wide-spread, that
then it concentrates itself in spots or on individuals, who become,
by their depth of knowledge and wisdom, the luminaries and guides
of the respective ages in which they live.* This is a curious doctrine, but it is a suggestive one, nevertheless.
*Whether our gifted novelist, Cooper, ever heard of this odd theory or not,
he certainly expresses himself not inharmoniously with it. In one of his works
(" Satanstoe ") he uses the following language: "The great evil under which
America labors is the sway of numbers, which is constantly elevating medi VOL. IV.-NO. VI. 35
545