THE HUMAN 8l-*JJIfiS. 44J 



migration from north to south, which caused the 

 intimate mixture of the fair and dark haired races in 

 middle and southern Europe, and in the end effected 

 that thorough civilization of the whole, on principles 

 of progression, continuing to develope science with 

 daily increasing rapidity, and tending shortly to em- 

 brace the whole earth. 



Though many of the parent races of nations now 

 remaining were without letters, or were possessed of 

 valuable elements of knowledge in a very circum- 

 scribed degree, there existed among them all, at a 

 period much earlier than is often allowed, a method of 

 embodying (it is true commonly under symbolical ex- 

 pressions) records of national belief, manners, and 

 events, which give occasional light, sufficient to rectify 

 the scanty data of the later classical writers, and the 

 documents contained in the acts of the earlier ages of 

 Christianity. These most ancient national legends 

 are poems, in various forms, and often in some part 

 religious. They are reports, such as Yirgil knew, and 

 interwove in his .ZEneid, concerning the tribes of 

 Latium, and Strabo asserts were possessed by the 

 Iberians. They were recitals committed to memory, 

 like the Homeric poems, preserved from one genera- 

 tion to another by repetition, with an exactness, all 

 things considered, wonderfully permanent. Thus the 

 Gael of the Scottish Highlands, and northern Irish, 

 have recorded the poems of Ossian, now thoroughly 

 proved to be genuine. Such are the thirty cantos of 



