Page:Lamb - History of the city of New York - Volume 1.djvu/29



WO Hundred and sixty-five years ago the site of the city of New York was a rocky, wooded, canoe-shaped, thirteen-mile-long island, bounded by two salt rivers and a bay, and peopled by dusky skin-clad savages. A half-dozen portable wigwam villages, some patches of tobacco and corn, and a few bark canoes drawn up on the shore, gave little promise of our present four hundred and fifty miles of streets, vast property interests, and the encircling forest of shipping. What have been the successive steps of the extraordinary transformation?

If the lineage, education, experiences, and character of a distinguished personage are replete with interest and instruction, of how much greater moment is the history of a city, which is biography in its most absolute sense? New York needs no introduction to the reader. It occupies an individual position among the great cities of the world. It is unlike any of its contemporaries. Its population is a singular intermixture of elements from all nations. Its institutions are the outgrowth of older civilizations; its wisdom and public opinion largely the reflection of a previous intelligence. All the ideas, principles, feelings, and traditions which ever made their appearance have here found a common field in which to struggle for existence, and the result, in so far as it is developed, has naturally been "the survival of the fittest." It would not be fair, however, to demand full fruits from so young a tree. New York