OP LANGUAGES. 539 



arrest the attention of the Philologist, and undergo that patient 

 and careful investigation, which the importance of the subject 

 demands. The inhabitants of these seas, scattered in dense masses 

 over a large portion of the eastern world, and connected for so 

 many centuries with the interests and political prosperity of 

 European nations, have, till very recently, occupied an ambiguous, 

 and perhaps false, position in our ethnographic and philological 

 charts. 



