PHYSICAL CONTEMPLATION OF THE UNIVERSE. 505 



are the most cultivated of all the Iberians ; they employ the 

 art of writing, and have written books containing memorials of 

 ancient times, and also poems and laws set in verse, for which 

 they claim an antiquity of six thousand years." I have dwelt on 

 these separate examples in order to show how much of ancient 

 cultivation, even amongst E.uropean nations, has been lost 

 without our being able to discover any trace of its existence, 

 and how the history of the earliest contemplation of the uni- 

 verse must continue to be limited to a very narrow compass. 



Beyond the 48th degree of latitude, north of the Sea of Azof 

 and of the Caspian, between the Don, the Wolga, and the Jaik, 

 where the latter flows from the southern aurtferous Uralian 

 mountains, Europe and Asia are, as it were, fused together by 

 flat steppes. Herodotus, in the same manner as Pherecydes 

 of Syros had previously done, regarded the whole of northern 

 Scythian Asia (Siberia), as belonging to Sarmatian Europe, 

 and even as forming a portion of Europe itself.* Towards 

 the south, our quarter of the globe is sharply separated from 

 Asia, but the far projecting peninsula of Asia Minor, and the 

 richly varied ^Egean Archipelago (serving as a bridge between 

 the two separate continents), have afforded an easy passage 

 for different races, languages, customs, and manners. West- 

 ern Asia has, from the earliest ages, been the great thorough- 

 fare for races migrating from the east, as was the north-west 

 of Greece for the Illyric races. The ^Egean Archipelago-, 

 which was in turn subject to Phoenician, Persian, and Greek 

 dominion, was the intermediate link between Greece and the 

 far East. 



When Phrygia was incorporated with Lydia, and both 

 merged into the Persian Empire, the contact led to the gene- 

 ral extension of the sphere of ideas amongst Asiatic and 

 European Greeks. The Persian rule was extended by the 

 warlike expeditions of Cambyses and Darius Hystaspes 

 from Cyrene and the Nile to the fruitful lands of the 



Ueber die Urbewohner Hispaniens, 1821, s. 123 and 131-136. The 

 Iberian alphabet has been successfully investigated in our own times by 

 M. de Saulcy ; the Phrygian, by the ingenious discoverer of arrow-headed 

 writing, Grotefend; and the Lycian, by Sir Charles Fellowes. (Compare 

 Ross, Hellenika, bd. i. s. xvi.) 



* Herod., iv. 42 (Schweighauser ad Herod., t. v. p. 204). Company 

 Humboldt, Asie centrale, t. i. pp. 54 and 577. 



