and the Natural History of' Man. 295 



paper, have derived their origin from the centre, through the 

 medium of the more civilized countries of Arabia and Egypt. 

 To the same source is probably to be referred the Basque lan- 

 guage, which may readily be conceived to have been introduced 

 into Spain by an aboriginal people, from the northern coast of 

 Africa ; and should any other dialects, spoken along the vi^estern 

 shores of Europe, be found to be cognate with the Basque, to 

 them also must the like origin be attributed. 



The remaining class of mankind which will here be mention- 

 ed, is that of which the Chinese, and the various Indo-Chinese 

 nations, may in the present day be regarded as the principal 

 representatives. 



In tracing back these people to their common origin with the 

 rest of mankind, in accordance with the foregoing hypothesis, it 

 is manifest that their progenitors must, in the earliest ages, have 

 occupied the more western portions of Asia, and that they were, 

 in fact, of like origin with the aborigines of the Peninsula of 

 India, of whom traces are yet left, in the Bheels and other sa- 

 vage races scattered over various portions of that peninsula, and 

 in the people found in greater numbers towards its southern ex- 

 tremity ; whose languages, of a totally distinct character from 

 the Sanscrit and its derivative dialects, plainly point to the 

 separate origin of those people from that of the Japhthitish 

 Hindoos. 



It is to this division of mankind that I conceive the designa- 

 tion of Semitic or Shemitish ought properly to be applied ; and 

 within this division must also be comprised the whole of the 

 aboriginal inhabitants of the Indian Archipelago, of Polynesia, 

 and likewise of America, excepting probably the tribes who in- 

 habit the extreme north of that continent ; but upon the sub- 

 ject of these people I will refrain from enlarging, as the grounds 

 upon which the classification of the varieties of the human spe- 

 cies has been attempted in this paper are intended to be essen- 

 tially philological, and that department of knowledge does not 

 (as far as I am acquainted with it,) afford sufficient data upon 

 which the proposed classification should be thus far extended.* 



* I am happy in meeting witb a remarkable confirmation of my views re- 

 specting the connection between the languages of Eastern Asia and America, 



