to other Branches of Knowledge. 317 



inscriptions — and from sepulchral relics discovered in many 

 countries, consisting of embalmed bodies, or more often the 

 mere skulls and skeletons of the ancient inhabitants, which 

 furnish the most authentic testimony, where it can be pro- 

 cured, as to the physical characters of various races of people. 

 Besides all these, there is another source of information more 

 extensively available than either of them ; I allude to the 

 history of languages and their affinities. 



The history of mankind is not destined, like the facts on 

 which geology is built, to be dug out of the bowels of the 

 earth, though some of the ancients thought otherwise, if we 

 may judge from the abundance of sculptures and inscriptions 

 with which they covered the sides of caverns and excavations. 

 Curious documents have, however, occasionally been dis- 

 covered in various countries beneath the soil, which have 

 brought evidence of historical facts otherwise unknown. We 

 may allude, for example, to the great collections of silver 

 money of the coinage of the early caliphs of Bagdad, which 

 have been dug up in various places on the shores of the Bal- 

 tic, marking out the path of an extensive traffic between 

 the East and North, at a time when the northern people of 

 Europe are generally supposed to have been in a state of 

 extreme barbarism. But the discoveries most interesting in 

 relation to ethnology are those of sepulchral remains, which, 

 in various regions of the world, have preserved the most au- 

 thentic records of the physical characters and the state of 

 arts that belonged to many ancient races. I need hardly al- 

 lude to the discoveries in the Egyptian Thebaid, — a vast se- 

 pulchre, where the successive generations of thirty centuries 

 lie embalmed beneath their dry preserving soil, expecting 

 vainly the fatal time, now long since passed, when they were 

 to be summoned before the tribunal of Sarapis. Another 

 African race exists only in mummies. I allude to the insular 

 Guanches, the ancient inhabitants of the Fortunate Islands, 

 who now, falsifying this name, exist only in the caverns of 

 Teneriffe, or in the European museums to which they have 

 been transported. Over vast wildernesses in the northern 

 regions of Asia, along the banks of the Irtish, and beyond 

 the remote Jenisei, innumerable tumuli are scattered, con- 



