xlviii INTRODUCTION. 



been called into existence. We must remember that the 

 time which chronology assigns to the period of the disper- 

 sion, little more than 2000 years before the birth of our Sa- 

 viour, is a period wonderfully short for such mighty changes. 

 Arid it is hard to conceive, that, within periods of time ap- 

 proaching to this, human creatures can have transported them- 

 selves through desolate, and even yet almost inaccessible, re- 

 gions, to the most distant islands of the remotest seas, nay, 

 lived and multiplied until every trace of their ancestry had 

 been lost, until every art which they had carried with them, 

 even to every word of their own tongue, had been forgotten, 

 and until they themselves had receded so far from the pris- 

 tine type of their race, as to leave the naturalist to question 

 whether they were not to be classed with an inferior tribe 

 of beings. These are great difficulties, not to be removed 

 by tracing the similarity of speech and customs, by which 

 different sections of mankind are connected. For what does 

 this similarity of speech and customs, even where it seems 

 to be the most clearly established, prove 1 It may prove the 

 relations established between tribes and nations after ages 

 of strife, migrations, and admixture of races, but it cannot 

 prove the relations between pristine tribes, every trace of 

 whose very existence may have been lost. It has been be- 

 lieved, that the people we call Hindoos extended themselves 

 beyond the Indus within the historical sera, but who were the 

 pre-existing inhabitants whom the Hindoos, under their Brah- 

 minical leaders, subdued ? There are the vestiges of anterior 

 races in the country as distinct from the Hindoo as the lat- 

 ter is from the Kalmuk, in aspect, speech, customs, and tra- 

 ditionary legends ; and in several of the great Islands of the 

 Eastern Seas, are insulated tribes of savages wholly distinct 

 from the other inhabitants, the manifest relicts of an anterior 

 people. In Europe the Celtse are known to have settled from 

 a period beyond the records of any history, and yet the Celtse 

 were a people possessed of a religion, laws, an order of 

 priests, and arts, comprehending the knowledge of metals. 



