204 EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPLATION 



overrun. The Arabians not only contributed to preserve 

 scientific cultivation, by leading men back to the perennial 

 sources of Greek philosophy, but they also extended that culti- 

 vation, and opened new paths to the investigation of nature. 

 The desolation of our continent by the overwhelming torrent 

 of invading nations commenced in the reign of Yalentinian I., 

 in the last quarter of the 4th century, when the Huns (of 

 Finnish not Mongolian origin) crossed the Don, and 

 oppressed the Alani, and later with the help of these, the 

 Ostrogoths. Tar off in eastern Asia, the torrent of 

 migrating nations had been set in motion several centuries 

 before our era. The first impulse was given, as we 

 have already said, by the attack of the Hiungnu (a Turk- 

 ish tribe), on the fair -haired and blue-eyed, perhaps Indo- 

 germanic, population of the Usiin, dwelling adjacent to the 

 Yueti (Getse ?), in the upper valley of the Hoangho in North- 

 western China. This desolating torrent, propagated from 

 the great wall erected against the Hiungnu (214 B.C.) to 

 the most western parts of Europe, moved through central 

 Asia north of the chain of the Himalaya. These Asiatic 

 hordes were not animated by any religious zeal before 

 they came in contact with Europe; it has even been 

 shown that they were not yet Buddhists ( 313 ) when they 

 arrived as conquerors in Poland and Silesia. Causes of an 

 entirely different kind gave to the warlike outbreak of a 

 southern people, the Arabians, a peculiar character. 



In the generally compact and unbroken continent of 

 Asia, ( 3U ) the almost detached peninsula of Arabia, between 

 the Bed Se. and the Persian Gulf, the Euphrates and the 

 Syrian part of the Mediterranean, forms a remarkably dis- 

 tinct feature. It is the westernmost of the three peninsulas 



