182 DIVERSITY OF RACES. 



few scattered savages gleaning their bare sustenance from a 

 sterile nature, are to be found the vestiges of an ancient people 

 which once was numerous, refined, arid powerful. Here have 

 been discovered in countless numbers ancient mines, quarries, 

 and tumuli, of which the barbarous tribes which now behold 

 them with a careless look or a vacant stare, have preserved not 

 the slightest account or tradition.* In the Ural and Altai Moun- 

 tains, are mines so long since abandoned that nature has even 

 already progressed far in the tedious process of filling them 

 again with the original materials. Quarries also are found, 

 deeply excavated, and in them the implements of the workmen ; 

 but the constructions, for which these doubtless afforded mate- 

 rials, exposed to the elements, have, with but few exceptions, 

 crumbled to dust. Of the mounds which are scattered up and 

 down on the banks of the Irtish and Yenisei, many contain 

 ornaments of gold and copper, beautifully embossed and of 

 exquisite workmanship ; but others present only the rude relics 

 of a people who had lived out their day before art was known 

 or mines were wrought. Would we now follow up the stream 

 of time to the era when this polished people, from unknown 

 causes, deserted their primeval seats, and still on to the far more 

 remote period of their origin ? We pass from age back to age, 

 from the fall to the rise of mighty empires and religions ; we 

 trace back the tribes chosen of God, to the patriarchal family of 

 the Deluge, and yet we have not probably arrived even to the 

 decline of this ancient race. But a nation springs not, Minerva- 

 like, into refinement in a day. And we have yet to allow for the 

 slow progress of man into the arts and inventions of compara- 

 tively civilized life. Who then, on that scroll of time which 

 counts its cycles of ages back to those when the giant creatures 

 of a tropical clime roamed over exuberant plains where are now 

 the wastes of Siberia, will venture to mark any but a darkly dis- 

 tant period for the origin of this long since extinct nation. 



Again, in Europe, we find the same peculiar phenomena, its 

 traditions and early history pointing ever northward; while 



*Prichard, vol. 4, p. 281; also vol. 5, p. xvii. Malte Brun, vol. 2, p. 394. 

 Tytler's Hist. vol. 5, p. 73. 



