their commerce; but they sooner also fell to decay, and have been successively in subjection to the descendants of Shem and Japheth.

Such is a brief account of the re-peopling of the earth by the immediate descendents of Noah. They were scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth at the building of the tower of Babel, and thus the sacred writer accounts for the various languages and dialects which prevail among the children of men. This event took place, according to the commonly received chronology, in the year from the creation 1757. It appears to have resulted from a desire, on the part of the great mass of the people, to counteract the design of heaven in their dispersion into other countries.

Nimrod, called in the Scriptures a mighty hunter, one of the sons of Cush, appears to have been their leader, and under his direction they migrated toward the South until they reached the plains of Shinar, where they built a city and commenced the erection of a tower, whose top, in their own language, should reach unto heaven, and let us, said they, make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. It is the opinion of those capable of forming a judgment upon the subject, that the tower of Belus, mentioned by Herodotus, was either the original tower of Babel repaired, or that it was constructed on the same foundation. Its remains are still visible; and Captain Mignan, in his travels in Chaldea, gives a description of their appearance. From their situation and magnitude, says he, I believe them to be the remains of the tower of Babel, an opinion likewise adopted by that venerable and highly distinguished geographer, Major Rennell. This solid mound, he continues, is a vast oblong square composed of kilnburned and sun-dried bricks, rising irregularly to the height of one hundred and thirty-nine feet at the southwest; whence it slopes toward the northeast to a depth of one hundred and ten feet. It is called by the natives, El Mujellibah, the overturned, and they have a tradition, handed down from time immemorial, that near the foot of the ruin is a well, invisible to mortals, in which those rebels were condemned by God to be hung with their heels upward, until the day of judgment, as a punishment for their wickedness.

Of Nimrod, of whom I have spoken as the leader in this undertaking, very little is said in the Bible. He is supposed to have been the author of the Zabian idolatry, or worship of the heavenly bodies; and, as may be inferred from the Scriptural account, it was he who subverted the patriarchal form of government, ambitiously. aiming, for himself, at universal empire.

After his death, says Watson, the great hunter was deified by his subjects, and supposed to be translated into the constellation of Orion, attended by his hounds, Sirius and Canicula, and still pursuing his favorite game, the great bear supposed to be translated into Ursa Major, near the North Pole. Upon these ingenious speculations, however, it is not my province to dwell. I choose rather to confine myself to those practical lessons which may be derived from what we know to be God's unalloyed truth. And first, as to his design in the destroying of this heavendaring tower and the confusion of languages consequently thereupon. Their object was to have a universal rallying point where they might all continue to dwell together, one vast consolidated empire, under the government of one mighty monarch, leaving unoccupied and unexplored the other parts of the world, or gradually extending their limits until the whole sphere should be brought within their sway. Let us make us a name, say they, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. The intention of heaven was to thwart that design; the purpose of the Most High being, as it is expressed in the book of Daniel, to separate the sons of Adam and to divide to the nations their inheritance; or, as it is more explicitly stated by St. Paul, when speaking of him whom the Athenians worshiped as the unknown God: He hath not only made of one blood all the nations of the earth, but he hath made them for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the time before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.

With reference to the confounding of the languages of men which then took place, there have been many sneers, and there has been much witticism expended by those who have predetermined that the account given by Moses is a fable or a fiction. Nor is this to be wondered at. Witticism is cheaper than argument, and

a sneer is quite as logical with multitudes as the deductions of sound reasoning; and with those whose minds are already made up, even more satisfactory. There are, however, several facts which cannot be ridiculed out of sight, nor laughed into non-existence. In the first place, there is now, and has been, so far back as all the records of uninspired history carry us, a great diversity in the languages of different nations. How is it accounted for? It is as much the business of him who rejects the Bible to solve this problem as it is mine or yours. If, at the beginning, one pair were created, they must have spoken one language, nor would their children have acquired any other, nor their descendants downward, so far as we can see, to the present day. We cannot conceive any adequate motive for the invention of a new language; there would have been no need of it, none for whom it would have been necessary. Then, again, if the deluge be a fact, and we have seen that there are traditions of it in all parts of the world, those who came out of the ark must have been of one speech, and the problem to be solved is, How came their descendants to differ so widely in the use of words wherewith to convey their ideas? Who was he who said, Go to, I'll start a new language, and teach it to my wife and children. Marvellous man! and there must have been many such, each of whom achieved a greater feat, infinitely greater, than did the world-renowned Cadmus, when, as the tradition has it, he unfolded to the astonished Greeks the sixteen curiously twisted characters which he called the letters of the alphabet. It is a little strange that men don't accomplish such feats in our day! Yankee ingenuity, proverbial as it is, is satisfied with coining a solitary word now and then. It will be a long time before it manufactures an entirely new language. There are the Rappists, with their community of goods, and chattels, and wives; the Mormons, determined to erect as high a barrier as possible between themselves and all other people; and in our own state the Shakers, firm in the belief that God is able, if it pleased him, out of the stones to raise up children unto Abraham. Go among these people. You will find that they have made very little progress toward a new language. They have a few uncouth barbarisms, and it may be a score or two of

slang phrases and cant expressions with a nasal twang, but that's all. I must not forget, however, that the skeptics of whom I speak jump over these difficulties and boldly cut the knot which they cannot untie. There never was any deluge; Noah? a creature of the imagination; Adam and Eve? a fable, a myth, an allegory. There never was any first man. No first man? then there could have been no second, could there? no tenth, no five hundredth. If you count at all, you must begin somewhere. But men sprung up. as chickweed does by the road-side, needing no creator, no protector, no nurse, no teacher. And as they grew up they began to talk to one another; there in sesquipedalian Greek, yonder in the gibberish of the Hottentot, there again in the porcine grunt of the Kickapoo Indian, and here in the nervous Anglo-Saxon. Talk about straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! Why the men who reject the simple narrative of Moses and profess to believe these crudities, would swallow a whole drove of camels or dromedaries, each with a whole family of Arabs perched upon his hump. But I have dwelt too long upon these fooleries. I advert again to the design of Heaven in thus scattering abroad the human race. Clear and unequivocal was that design, that upon this broad earth there should be no such thing as a universal empire; that men should dwell together in different nations, each with the bounds of their habitation marked out by Him who is the one Sovereign of earth as well as the King of heaven. The grasping at universal empire, the building of a mighty tower, has been tried again and again with the same fate as befell the structure on the plains of Babylon. The Persians tried it, and the Greeks, and the Romans, and for a brief space in her haughtiness Rome wrote herself mistress of the whole earth She had made herself a name, but her tower fell; and her pride, and her pomp, and her glory have been for ages in

the dust. Within our own memory men began to build a mighty tower; and the little Corsican, with an ambition more grasping than even that of Nimrod, aimed at, and almost reached, the universal sovereignty of Europe. Where now is that imperial tower? He whose vision is not bounded by second causes, who remembers that He who sitteth between the cher

ubim is king of the whole earth, and that he doeth what he will in the armies of heaven and among the children of men, cannot help seeing the same hand which destroyed the Tower of Babel in the plains of Shinar, the same power routing the legions, and scattering like the small dust of the threshing floor the flaunting eagles on the plains of Waterloo. And here is the one great lesson of our subject. God will permit no towering Babel to overshadow his sin-stricken but redeemed world. is he who hath decreed that nations shall dwell separately; it is he who hath appointed the bounds of their habitation.

CALIFORNIA SIX YEARS AGO.

It

THREE years in California is the title

THRE

of a new work recently published in London. The author, Mr. Borthwick, was a victim to that peculiar disease the "gold fever." The fever seized him in 1851; he fled from a pleasant life and a comfortable home; dashed off from New-York for Chagres, became very sea-sick en route, but he did not repent-at least he does not say so—and was landed at length safely in San Francisco. The city, six years ago, was in a much more primitive state than at present. Manners and morals were at a low ebb. Every man then carried his revolver or his bowie-knife, quarreled with his neighbor or was quarreled with, and had no other alternative open to

him but to murder, or be murdered.

The

city was divided between gambling booths,

drinking saloons, theaters, and thieves; a crop of villains, too, of the most accomplished class, was plentiful; while the vices and depravities of civilization, flavored with the spice of thorough unrestraint, were reveled in with savage greediness. Never was there such a pandemonium as San Francisco exhibited six years ago, nor such a remarkable instance of a commerce arising so purely speculative, profitable, and generally successful.

He says:

"San Francisco exhibited an immense amount of vitality compressed into a small compass, and a degree of earnestness was observable in every action of a man's daily life. People lived more there in a week than they would in a year in most other places.

"In the course of a month, or a year, in San Francisco, there was more hard work done, more speculative schemes were conceived and executed, more money was made and lost, there

was more buying and selling, more sudden changes of fortune, more eating and drinking, chewing, more crime and profligacy, and, at the more smoking, swearing, gambling, and tobaccosame time, more solid advancement made by the people, as a body, in wealth, prosperity, and the refinements of civilization, than could be shown in an equal space of time by any community of the same size on the face of the earth.

"The every-day jog-trot of ordinary human existence was not a fast-enough pace for Californians in their impetuous pursuit of wealth. The longest period of time ever thought of was a month. Money was loaned, and houses were rented, by the month; interest and rent being invariably payable monthly and in advance. All engagements were made by the month, during which period the changes and contingencies were so great that no one was willing to commit himself for a longer term. In the space of a month the whole city might be swept off by fire, and a totally new one might be flourishing in its place. So great was the constant fluctuation in the price of goods, and so rash and speculative was the usual style of business, that no great idea of stability could be attached to anything, and the ever-varying aspect of the streets, as the houses were being constantly pulled down and rebuilt, was emblematic of the equally varying fortunes of the inhabitants."

There was no order, honesty, safety, or police, and the only law that of selfdefense, or mob justice. In such a city robbery and murder were rife, revenge common, and vice predominant. But in all congregations of men, however depraved, however madly resolved to maintain themselves free from all restraint, the profound truth that it is better to live under any authority than under none, later insures a prompt and decisive result. strikes their convictions, and sooner or The great social necessities, "law and order," come to the surface, and after a brief struggle are indelibly stamped upon the society, and firmly established among takes effect, and society immediately the people. The natural law of reaction avenges itself by stern decrees against the license of the previous age.

the rule. In less than five years law and San Francisco offered no exception to order were established. Public opinion controlled individual conduct. The attractions of vice gave way to the enjoyments of social life, of home, of marriage, Trade, and comand domestic comfort. merce, and the ledger, superseded cards and the gambling saloons; rascality and vice were fairly beaten out of the field by industry and respectability; and the very men who a few years before exhausted

after taunting and threatening each other in this way for about an hour, during which time, although the excitement seemed to be continually increasing, not a blow was struck nor a stone thrown, the two parties suddenly, and without any apparent cause, fraternized, and moved off together to their tents. What all the row was about, or why peace was so suddenly proclaimed, was of course a mystery to us outside barbarians; and the tame and unsatisfactory termination of such warlike demonstrations was a great disappointment, as we had been every moment expecting that the ball would open, and hoped to see a general engagement.

"It reminded me of the way in which a couple of French Canadians have a set-to. Shaking their fists within an inch of each other's faces, they call each other all the names imaginable, beginning with sacré cochon, and going through a long series of still less complimentary epithets, till finally sacré astrologe caps the climax. This is a regular smasher; it is supposed to be such a comprehensive term as to exhaust the whole vocabulary; both parties then give in for want of ammunition, and the fight is over. I presume it was by a similar process that the Chinamen arrived at a solution of their difficulty; at all events, discretion seemed to form a very large component part of Celestial valor."

tried to keep pace with the progress of the day.

"They had their theater and their gamblingrooms, the latter being small dirty places, badly lighted with Chinese paper lamps. They played a peculiar game. The dealer placed on the table several handfuls of small copper coins, with square holes in them. Bets were made by placing the stake on one of four divisions, marked in the middle of the table, and the dealer, drawing the coins away from the heap, four at a time, the bets were decided according to whether one, two, three, or four remained at the last. They are great gamblers, and, when their last dollar is gone, will stake anything they possess: numbers of watches, rings, and such articles, were always lying in pawn on the table.

"The Chinese theater was a curious pagoda. looking edifice, built by them expressly for theatrical purposes, and painted, outside and in, in an extraordinary manner. The performances went on day and night, without intermission, and consisted principally of juggling and feats of dexterity. The most exciting part of the exhibition was when one man, and decidedly a man of some little nerve, made a spread eagle of himself and stood up against a door, while half a dozen others, at a distance of fifteen or twenty feet, pelted the door with sharp-pointed bowie-knives, putting a knife into

Sus

"Here the majority of the houses were of Chinese importation, and were stores, stocked with hams, tea, dried fish, dried ducks, and other very nasty-looking Chinese eatables, besides copper-pots and kettles, fans, shawls, chessmen, and all sorts of curiosities. pended over the doors were brilliantly-colored boards, about the size and shape of a headboard over a grave, covered with Chinese characters, and with several yards of red ribbon streaming from them; while the streets were thronged with long-tailed Celestials, chattering vociferously as they rushed about from store to store, or standing in groups studying the Chinese bills posted up in the shop windows, which may have been play-bills-for there was a Chinese theater-or perhaps advertisements informing the public where the best rat pies were to be had. A peculiarly nasty smell pervaded this locality, and it was generally be

lieved that rats were not so numerous here as elsewhere.

"Owing to the great scarcity of washerwomen, Chinese energy had ample room to display itself in the washing and ironing business. Throughout the town might be seen occasionally, over some small house, a large American sign, intimating that Ching Sing, Wong Choo, or Ki-chong did washing and ironing at five dollars a dozen. Inside these places one found two or three Chinamen ironing shirts with large flat-bottomed copper pots full of burning charcoal, and, buried in heaps of dirty clothes, half a dozen more, smoking and drinking tea."

But the Celestials did not despise the vices of European civilization. They

ing the man. It was very pleasant to see, from the unflinching way in which the fellow stood it out, the confidence he placed in the infallibility of his brethren. They had also short dramatic performances, which were quite unintelligible to outside barbarians. The only point of interest about them was the extraordinary gorgeous dresses of the actors; but the incessant noise they made with gongs and kettledrums was so discordant and deafening, that a few minutes at a time was as long as any one could stay in the place."

Among the principal sports of the diggings in California is the bear and bullfight; here is a description of one, which the reader may compare with the account of a Spanish bull-fight by one of our own correspondents in the present number. Savage brutality characterizes both; and we are not sure that in this respect the palm does not belong to our own country

men.

The bear, a fine specimen of a grizzly, called after General Scott, was chained in the middle of the arena by a twenty foot chain.

"The next thing to be done was to introduce the bull. The bars between his pen and the arena were removed, while two or three men stood ready to put them up again as soon as he should come out. But he did not seem to like the prospect, and was not disposed to move till pretty sharply poked up from behind, when, making a furious dash at the red flag