INTRODUCTION.

AMERICA, of the three quarters of the world that lie beyond the limits of Europe, possesses the strongest claim upon the attention of the nations of that continent. It has had the most powerful influence in calling forth their energies, and modifying their destiny. The moment, in which that mysterious veil was lifted up, which had so long covered from their eyes this other half of the world which they inhabited, was the most memorable in their annals. It was a moment mighty in itself, and big with a long train of event and adventure. America was every way a different world from that to which the eyes of its discoverers had been familiar. Nature appeared in savage and primeval grandeur, without a trace of those arrangements of art and culture, which give to Europe its form and aspect. The eternal forest, not planted by human hand, covered almost its entire surface. Every feature existed on a bold and

sublime scale. The mountains were more extended, more lofty, and subject to volcanic action more terrible, than any yet known to exist in the old world. Rivers, rolling across the entire breadth of the continents, held a course so immense, and poured such a profusion of waters, that streams which appeared great in Europe ranked here only as creeks or rivulets. Man in America was a still more singular object than the region which he occupied. The man of nature was seen ranging through his primeval forests, a stranger to art, to science, to even the rudest forms of social existence. Even in the few favoured regions where civilization had already begun her career, it had taken a direction, and assumed forms, essentially different from those which the old world any where exhibited.

As the new world thus presented so many objects calculated to arrest the attention and enlarge the ideas of its visitants, it afforded also peculiar excitements to their energy and enterprise. Being found thinly peopled by savage, and, as compared to their invaders, defenceless tribes, the discovering nations established among themselves, certainly an iniquitous law, by which every part of America was held to belong to the European by whom it was first discovered and occupied. The early prizes were singularly brilliant. Private individuals, often of humble birth, made the conquest of empires, whose treasures eclipsed even the boasted wealth of the East. kingdom after kingdom opened to the view, the sanguine hope was always excited, that a new adventurer would arrive at something still more splendid

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