In Sweden the young Gustavus Adolphus was about to come to the throne. In Russia the dawn of a new era was being ushered in by the accession of the first sovereign of the house of Romanoff. In the south of Europe, on the other hand, the glories of long ages of commercial, intellectual, and political supremacy were fading away : the Italian republics were beginning to decline, and the might of Spain was tottering to its fall. To this period belong many of the world's greatest inventive and philosophical intellects: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rubens, Van Dyck, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood, and Lord Bacon, who said of the early attempts to utilize the discoveries of Columbus : kk Certainly it is with the kingdoms of the earth as it is in the kingdom of Heaven : sometimes a grain of mustard seed becomes a greattree. Who can tell? " And in this grand epoch of mental activity and political change a more rational spirit respecting the uses to be made of America was becoming conspicuously manifest. The sixteenth century had been wholly wasted so far as the legitimate development of the newly discovered lands beyond the sea was conwith the first decade of the seventeenth soberly conceived cernedbut ; foot. During that decplans of orderly colonization began to be set on settlements in Canada, ade the French inaugurated their permanent an established last at Smith, John Captain under English, the and secure the on founded because enduring colonv in Virginia-- enduring basis of mutual self-interest, labor, and economy. Even Spain, with all her greed for new realms to pillage, had practically abandoned the for futile hope of forcing a gateway to them at the west. It remained thenmake to the Dutch the most practical-minded people in Europe, as entry into America, in matter-of-fact times and circumstances such the almost Cathay-- far the to these, upon a mere quixotic expedition last one, happily, of its grotesque kind.