ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS, 95 



century before the Christian era, was a general name for the Ti, 

 Thu-kiu or Turks, in the north and north-west of China. The 

 southern Hiongnu overcame the Chinese, and in conjunction with 

 them destroyed the empire of the northern Hiongnu. These latter 

 fled to the west, and this flight seems to have given the first im- 

 pulse to the migration of nations in Middle Asia. The Huns, who 

 were long confounded with the Hiongnu (as the Uigures with the 

 Ugures and the Hungarians), belonged, according to Klaproth, to 

 the Finnish race of the Ural mountains between Europe and Asia, 

 a race which was variously mingled with Germans, Turks, and 

 Samoieds. (Klaproth, Asia Polyglotta,, pp. 183 and 211 ; Tableaux 

 Historiques de 1'Asie, pp. 102 and 109.) The Huns (OvwoC) are 

 first named by Dionysius Perigetes, a writer who was able to obtain 

 more accurate information respecting the interior of Asia, because, 

 as a learned man born at Charax on the Arabian Gulf, Augustus 

 had sent him back to the East to accompany thither his adopted son 

 Caius Agrippa. Ptolemy, a century later, writes the word (Xowot) 

 with a strong aspiration, which, as St. Martin observes, is found 

 again in the geographical name of Chunigard. 



(**) p. 29." No carved Stone." 



On the banks of the Orinoco near Caicara, where the forest region 

 joins the plain, we have indeed found representations of the sun, 

 and figures of animals, cut on the rocks : but in the Llanos them- 

 selves no traces of these rude memorials of earlier inhabitants have 

 been discovered. It is to be regretted that we have not received 

 any more complete and certain information respecting a monument 

 which was sent to France to Count Maurepas, and which, according 

 to Kalm, had been found by M. de Yerandrier . in the Prairies of 

 Canada 900 miles west of Montreal, in the course of an expedition 

 intended to reach the Pacific. (Kalrn's Keise, th. iii. s. 416.) 

 This traveller found in the middle of the plain enormous masses of 

 stone, placed in an upright position by the hand of man, and on 

 one of them was something which was taken to be a Tartar inscrip- 

 tion. (Archseologia : or Miscellaneous Tracts, published by the 

 Society of Antiquaries of London, vol. viii. 1787, p. 304.) How 

 is it that so important a monument has remained unexamined ? 



