512 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



so to speak — little oases of one speech or blood or religion in the 

 desert of another — will serve to lead up to the curious romances of 

 ethnology and philology which I mean to huddle loosely together in 

 this article. Everybody is familiar, of course, with such stories as 

 that of the mutineers of the Bounty, who founded the colony on 

 Pitcairn's Island, where a little community, about one quarter Brit- 

 ish and three quarters Polynesian, preserved the English language 

 and the Christian religion for many years, without the slightest inter- 

 course with the outer world. Equally significant in their way are 

 the belated islands of Celticism in America, such as the Highlanders 

 of Glengarry, in Canada, who migrated in a mass, and who still 

 speak no tongue but Gaelic; or the Glamorganshire Welsh of the 

 Pennsylvanian mining districts, who inhabit whole villages where 

 Cymric is now the universal language. Again, we may take as typical 

 examples of such insulation in the matter of religion the Abyssinian 

 Christians, almost entirely cut off for centuries from the rest of 

 Christendom by the intrusive belt of ]N^ubian and Egyptian Islam. 

 Who does not know, once more, that strange outlying church, the 

 Christians of St. Thomas, whom the early Portuguese navigators 

 found still surviving on the Malabar coast in India? Though be- 

 lieving themselves to derive their Christianity from the preaching of 

 St. Thomas, these native sectaries are really a branch of the IS'es- 

 torian Church of Persia — a distant scion of the Patriarchate of 

 Babylon. Founded in the sixth century, their sect was recruited by 

 successive flights of refugees from the revived Zoroastrianism of that 

 date, and the triumphant Mohammedanism of succeeding genera- 

 tions. Their sacred language is even now Syriac. Or, finally, may 

 we not take the racial islands, like the ancient Basque nationality 

 in France and Spain, the Black Celts of Ireland and Scotland, and 

 the Germans of Transylvania? side by side with whom we may 

 place the scattered and intermixed races, like the Jews and the 

 Gypsies, who still preserve some relics of their ancient tongues, 

 while speaking in each country the language of the inhabitants. 

 It will be clear at once from so rapid a survey of these few familiar 

 instances that a map of the world, colored by race, by speech, or 

 by religion, would be dotted all over with insulated colonies, as 

 quaint and suggestive in their way as that of the mutineers of the 

 Bounty. 



Consider, as one striking and well-known example, the curious 

 history of the Parsees, earlier pilgrim fathers of an Oriental May- 

 flower, who fled eastward and southward before the face of Islam 

 in Persia to the west coast of India. Their very name means 

 Persians; they are the remnant of the ancient Zoroastrian religion, 

 followers of that shadowy and doubtful prophet, whose very exist- 



