and the Natural History of' Man. 293 



guages of the great Germanic family, the Celtic, and the Sla- 

 vonian. 



Of these, the various languages of Europe and Asia-Minor 

 may be regarded as aboriginal ; that is to say, as having been 

 spoken by the people who were the first inhabitants of those 

 portions of the globe. On the other hand, the Sanscrit is ad- 

 mitted to be the language, not of the aborigines, but of a race 

 of conquerors, who entered the Indian peninsula from the north- 

 west, and extirpated or drove southward before them the native 

 races. In like manner must it be considered that the Zend 

 (the intimate connexion of which language with the Sanscrit is 

 well established,) was not the primitive language of Persia, but 

 was introduced into that country also by the same exotic race, 

 whose original seat must be looked for in the mountainous coun- 

 try to the west of the Caspian. 



To this class of languages, and to the people among whom 

 the various dialects of them are spoken, — which people are, in 

 the present day, spread not only over Europe and a consider- 

 able portion of Asia, but, by means of European settlements 

 and conquests, over the vast continent of America also, and who 

 have likewise taken root in what may be regarded as a fifth 

 quarter of the globe, namely, Australia, — the designation of 

 Japetic or Japhthitish may, with the strictest propriety, be ap- 

 plied. 



The next grand division of mankind is composed (in part) of 

 the nations to whom belong the so-called Semitic or Aramean 

 languages ; namely, the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Chaldee, and 

 the Syriac. 



The reason of this nomenclature is, that the Hebrew and the 

 Arabic are the languages spoken by the people who are regard- 

 ed as the descendants of Abraham ; whilst the Chaldee and 

 Syriac are considered to have been vernacular in Mesopotamia 

 and Syria among the descendants of Aram ; both those patri- 

 archs being of the posterity of Shem, the eldest son of Noah. 

 Philologists have already discovered, however, that affinities ex- 

 ist between these so-called Semitic tongues and other languages, 

 such as the Phoenician, the Coptic, the Geez, and the Amharic (?) 

 of Abyssinia, and the Berber of Northern Africa, to which the 

 same designation cannot, with any correctness of nomenclature, 



