MIGRATIONS OF RACES OF MEN CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY. 579 



siderable number of iininigraiits from the old slave States; and western 

 Oregon enjoys, in respect of its maritime position, an equable climate, 

 with winters milder than those of Missouri. 



lY. — THE LARGER SERIES OF MIGRATIONS. 



Without attempting- to present a chronological view of the prin- 

 cipal migrations by which the population of the world has been shifted, 

 I will attempt to indicate very briefly the main epochs at which these 

 have been most frequent or most important. They may be classed in 

 five groups, corresponding- to five i>eriods in the history of those parts 

 of the world of which we possess a history. The first epoch covers pre- 

 historic times, times known' to us only by faint traditions and by the 

 results of philological and archicological inquiry. We are able to say 

 that certain movements of races did take place before the date of our 

 earliest written records, but unable to fix these movements to any point 

 of time. Thus there is reason to believe that the Celtic races advanced 

 from east to west, partly forcing- into corners, partly fusing- with, that 

 earlier population of Gaul and Britain which is usually called Iberian, 

 and of which the Basques are supposed to be representatives. Thus 

 the Etruscans descended from the Alps into middle Italy, as the ances- 

 tors of the Latins and Sabellians would appear to have done at an 

 earlier date. It seems probable that the Slavs and Letts came to the 

 Oder and the Vistula from the southeast. Recent philological research 

 lends weight to the view that the Phrygians and the Armenians, bath 

 races of the Indo-European fiimily, were originally settled in south- 

 eastern Europe, and crossed the Bosphorus into the seats where authen- 

 tic history finds them. At some remote but quite undetermined time 

 Aryan invaders entered northwestern India, and slowly spread to the 

 south and east from the Punjab; while, at a still earlier epoch, another 

 race coming- from the west passed througli Beluchistan (where it has 

 left a trace of its passage in the langtiage spoken by the Brahuis) and 

 moved southeastward into the Dekkan and southern India, in which 

 its four great allied tongues, those we call Dravidian,* are now spoken 

 by nearly 30,000,000 people. ISTor have we any materials for ascertain- 

 ing- the time at which the Polynesian Islands were occupied by the two 

 races, the brown and the black or negroid, which now inhabit them, 

 and both of which seem to have come from the East Indian Archipelag-o, 

 passing- from isle to isle in their canoes against the trade winds that 

 blow from the American coast. Finally, it is to prehistoric and prob- 

 ably to very remote times that belongs the settlement of the two 

 American continents by immigrants from Asia, immigrants who appear 

 to have crossed Bering Straits, or made their way along the line of the 

 Aleutian Isles,t and thence to have slowly drifted southward from 



^TaiTiil, Tehigii, Canarese, and INIalayalam. 



ISoiiiu recent writers wonld refer the entrance of the present American races into 

 their continent to a period so remote as that in which Asia was joined by dry laud 

 to America. 



