PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 237 



raer ; spreading up the Salt plains, as far as the 50th degree of 

 N. Lat. Here commence dense forests and the chain of the 

 Ouralian mountains, which, though they are of small elevation 

 in general, still they prove to have been a boundary line of 

 a family of nations for many centuries. These obstacles 

 appeared to the lecturer the cause of an accumulation of co- 

 lonists, and he remarked that it was in that region the ancients 

 placed their Arimaspian state. Arimaspi he translated from the 

 Pehlevi to horse-warriors. 



He then described the gradual passage of small tribes across 

 the rivers Volga and Don, and of others over the ice in winter, 

 forming the nucleus of the 40 nations of Western Scythae. He 

 then adverted to greater swarms that forced their way to the 

 South, into Armenia and Persia, where, however, they appear to 

 have been anticipated by kindred nations, who came by a third 

 road, out of the central mountains of Asia, passing along the 

 Suleimany chain, West of the Indus, to the South, till they 

 could turn Westward, by one or other of the affluents, into the 

 river Helmund ; which brought them, at its termination in a lake, 

 within a few days' route of Ancient Persepolis, and thence they 

 could easily arrive at the Tigris. Here the lecturer pointed out 

 the existence of a series of cromlechs, stone circles, and maen- 

 stones, along the whole way, from the Indus to the Tigris. Con- 

 sidering this route as the most ancient by which Celto Scythae 

 and Scythse came towards the West : he thought that the Hyksos 

 or Haik wearers of ancient Egypt as not unlikely to have been of 

 that family of colonists, who also may have introduced the Indian 

 rudiments of architecture in the Delta, and who, when expelled, 

 retreated to Scychopolis, in Palestine, and pastured their flocks 

 in the Hauran. 



Reverting again to the North, the lecturer noticed a theory 

 which would account for the sudden commencement of the 

 swarming of migratory nations, and their passage down the Bos- 

 phorus into the Mediterranean. This theory reposed upon the 

 Ogygian deluge, and the sudden contraction of the surface of an 

 immense inland sea, into three smaller ones, by the breaking 

 of the Bosphorus, and the passage of the waters from the low- 

 lands of Russia, through this channel, into the Mediterranean : 

 and by the reduction of level, the Black Sea, the Caspian and the 

 lake of Aral may have been divided, from one, into three seas. 

 In support of the theory, he produced sundry arguments shew- 

 ing the low levels of the Caspian and the Aral, the existence of 



