EAKLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 235 



appear that they are comparatively a very ancient portion of 

 mankind. India possessed an aboriginal population of this 

 stock, who appear to have been driven into the Dekhan and 

 Ceylon, or only left amongst the mountains. The Iberians or 

 Cantabrians of Spain are discovered from the remains of their 

 language (the Basque) to have been of this race. Of the same 

 connexion were the Jotuns of the north of Europe. And these 

 appear as the relics of European aborigines, who must have 

 regarded the Celts and the Germanic tribes as invaders of 

 their territories. Nouns incapable of variation of any kind, 

 and the use of suffixes to make up for this want, are the lead- 

 ing features of the Ugro-Tartarian languages, besides a peculiar 

 euphonic principle depending on the use of only vowels of 

 certain sets in the same words. By such features it is that 

 modern philologists can trace to their origin and confidently 

 classify tribes who have for ages been nestling in obscure nooks 

 of the earth. On such ground it is believed by some that the 

 Celtic population of the British Islands has sustained at an 

 early period an infusion of Lappish blood. 



The fourth family of languages is the Chinese, which com- 

 prehends the tongue spoken by the Chinese people, the language 

 of Thibet, and the Indo-Chinese idioms. The distinguishing 

 features of the Chinese language are, its consisting altogether 

 of monosyllables, and being destitute of all grammatical forms, 

 except certain arrangements and accentuations, which vary the 

 sense of particular words. It is also deficient in some of the 

 consonants most conspicuous in other languages, b, d, r, v, and 

 z ; so that this people can scarcely pronounce our speech in 

 such a way as to be intelligible ; for example, the word Christus 

 they call Kuliss-ut-oo-suh. The Chinese, strange to say, though 

 they early attained to a remarkable degree of civilization, and 

 have preceded the Europeans in many of the most important 

 inventions, have a language which resembles that of children, 

 or deaf and dumb people. The sentence of short, simple, un- 

 connected words, in which an infant amongst us attempts to 

 express some of its wants and its ideas the equally broken 

 and difficult terms which the deaf and dumb express by signs, 

 as the following passage of the Lord's Prayer : " Our Father, 

 heaven in, wish your name respect, wish your soul's kingdom 

 providence arrive, wish your will do heaven earth equality," 

 etc. these are like the discourse of the refined people of the 

 so-called Celestial Empire. An attempt was made by the 

 Abbe Sicard to teach the deaf and dumb grammatical signs ; 



