EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 239 



possession of one large section of the table-land of Central 

 Asia. We still find there a possible cradle for this peculiar 

 family of mankind. 



Of the Indo-European variety, the Asiatic branch is divided 

 into two principal stems, the Indians and the Persians. Dr. 

 Prichard speaks of them as arising from two principal foci at 

 no great distance from each other, in the southern portion of 

 the same table-land. In the north-west part of the region 

 between the Himalaya and Vindhya mountains, in countries 

 watered by the Saraswati, "the earliest traditions of the 



Brahmins place the ancestors of the Indian race There," 



says the learned ethnologist, "the Hindoos had the seat of 

 their early national existence twenty-five centuries before the 

 Christian era, and thence they appear gradually to have spread, 

 under the hierarchy of the Brahmins and their two royal dy- 

 nasties, descendants of the sun and moon, over the different 

 provinces of Rajputana,- Ayodhya, Saurasktra, and further 

 eastward to Indraprest'ha, or Delhi, and to Magadha and the 

 Gangetic provinces." He adds, " to the westward of the Indus, 

 not far from Bamian or from Balkh, was the country which 

 the earliest traditions of the Persians point out as the primeval 

 seat and paradise of their race." 



With regard to the Chinese, or that vast family of mankind 

 spreading along the coast from the Ganges to the Hoang-ho, 

 and even farther northward, Dr. Prichard says and the im- 

 portance of using his language on the occasion must be obvious 

 " With the rivers which descend from the high country of 

 Central Asia, and from their diverging waters on all sides, 

 after traversing extensive regions of lower elevation, into the 

 remote ocean, these nations appear also to have come down, at 

 various periods, from the south-eastern border of the Great 

 Plateau ; in different parts of which tribes are still recognised, 

 who resemble them in features and in language." The Chinese 

 proper were originally, according to their own historians, a 

 small horde of barbarians, who wandered about the foot of the 

 high mountains of the Thibetan border of China, without 

 settled dwellings, clothed in skins, and ignorant of the use of 

 fire. " They appear," says Dr. Prichard, " to have descended 

 along the valley of the Hoang-ho, from the high countries 

 situated to the northward of Shenshi, in the plains of which 

 province we first discover them in the dawning of history wan- 

 dering with their herds, and similar in their habits to the 

 nomadic nations of high Central Asia The migration 



