FOUNTAIN-HEADS OF HUMANITY. 175 



where the herds can obtain but an insufficient pasture, where game 

 very seldom shows itself the reader will suppose that they can only 

 subsist by plundering or ransoming the caravans. These are the 

 rovers, the pirates of the Sea of Sand. There are " land-rats," 

 Shakspeare tells us, as well as " water-rats." Others, again, there 

 are who seem convinced that " honesty is the best policy," who give 

 themselves up exclusively to commercial transactions, and act as 

 agents and intermediaries between nations separated from one 

 another by leagues of rock and sand, for the exchange of their respec- 

 tive products. It might be said of these that they discharged a 

 useful and honourable function, if the purchase and sale of slaves 

 were not the most ordinary, and unfortunately the most lucrative, of 

 their operations. 



In our previous examination of the peoples of the Steppes, we 

 discovered that all were more or less directly sprung from the same 

 sources ; the yellow or Mongolian race, which blends in the north 

 with the Hyperborean race, and in the west with the Japhetic or 

 Indo-Germanic. We have now to note a not less remarkable fact 

 that the whole Desert zone is likewise occupied by one family, the 

 Semitic, modified in certain parts of Africa by commixture with the 

 Xegro race. Soon we shall see the latter peopling of itself the plains 

 of Central and Southern Africa ; the Malayo-Polynesian and Papuan, 

 but slightly distinguished from the preceding, in possession of the 

 islands of the Indian Ocean, those of Oceania, and the Australian 

 continent ; the Hyperborean race, scattered through the Arctic soli- 

 tudes ; and, finally, the "Red Man," gradually dying away among 

 the prairies and forests of the two Americas : so that, to each of 

 the great divisions of the Savage or Desert World corresponds one of 

 the great fractions of the human species. 



The Shemites so named because the Bible attributes their origin 

 to Shem, the eldest son of Noah are now-a-days represented only by 

 the Jews and the Arabs, though they formerly included also the 

 Assyrians, the Chaldseans or Babylonians, the Syrians, Phoenicians, 

 and Ethiopians. Of their modern representatives, the Jews alone 



