i88 GEOLOGY AAD HISTORY 



6. If we ask what our narrator supposed to be 

 the original or Noachic tongue, we might infer from 

 his three lines of descent, and from the locality of the 

 dispersion and the episode of Nimrod's prehistoric 

 kingdom, that the primitive language of Chaldea 

 would be the original stem ; and this we now know 

 from authentic written records to have been an 

 agglutinate language of the type usually known as 

 Turanian, and more closely allied to the Tartar and 

 Chinese tongues than to other kinds of speech. It 

 would follow that what we now call Semitic and 

 Aryan or Japhetic forms of speech must, in the view 

 of our ancient authority, date from the sequelae of the 

 great ' confusion of tongues.' 



These points being premised, we can clear away 

 the fogs which have been gathered around this little 

 luminous spot in the early history of the world, and 

 can trace at least the principal ethnic lines of radiation 

 from it. Though the writer gives us three main 

 branches of affiliation of the children of Noah, he 

 really refers to six principal lines of migration, three 

 of them belonging to that multifarious progeny of 

 Ham, in which he seems to include both the Turanian 

 and Negroid types of our ordinary classifications, as 

 well as some of the brown and yellow races. 



One of the lines of affiliation of Ham leads 

 eastward and is not traced ; but if the Cushite people, 

 who are said to have gone to the land which in earlier 

 antediluvian times was that of ' gold and bedolach 

 and shoham stone,' that is, along the fertile valley of 



