TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 181 



docoa-nut, and the sugar-cane, witli sucli domestic animals as the dog, the hog, and 

 common fowl. But, like the rudest Americans, they had no domestic animals for 

 labom-, and were ignorant of iron and every other metal. Notwithstanding, there- 

 fore, a fertile soil and mild climate, cut ofi^ as they were, from all intercom-se with 

 more civilized strangers, they could not be expected to have gone beyond the point 

 of civilization which they were found to have attained when Europeans first saw 

 them. Such of them as had no domestic animals, or not an adequate supply of them, 

 were imdoubtedly cannibals. The people of the Sandwich Islands — now Christians 

 — certainly were so but eighty years ago. 



Advancing to higher civilizations, I may begin with the Persian. Persia is a 

 plateau generally rising about 3000 feet above the level of the sea. The gi-eater part 

 of it is within the temperate region, but a considerable portion subtropical. It 

 has many deserts and salt lakes. In these deserts the fertile spots, that is, those 

 that are supplied with water, are few in comparison. To this general character, 

 however, the lands bordering on the Caspian, copiously iriigated from a range of 

 high mountains, are au exception, for they are eminently fertile. The Persian race 

 is a peculiar one, and among Asiatics a highly endowed one, personally and intel- 

 lectually. For five-and-twenty centmies, and probably even a longer time, it has 

 been in possession of letters and the skill to erect durable monmuents. But the 

 physical geography of the country is certainly a serious impediment to a stable and 

 lasting civilization, for it not only encourages the invasion, but the permanent set- 

 tlement within its borders of pastoral tribes, still retaining their nomadic habits. 

 These wandering tribes, difi'ering in language and manners from the Persians, are 

 estimated to amount to a foiu-th part of the population. This is as if one-fourth 

 part of the popidation of England were to consist of armed gipsies. My next 

 example is the coimtiy of the Hindus, aland which nourishes twohundred millions of 

 men, but which, like much of Africa and of Australia; would assuredlj- have been but 

 an arid desert, with pastoral tribes wandering over it, had it not been for the Hi- 

 malayas and the Ghauts, the sources of those gi-eat ri\ ers which have given it soil, 

 inigation, and means of intercommuuication. Hindustan is almost as imbroken a 

 mass of land as Africa itself, and more so than Australia ; and the amount of this 

 disadvantage may be estimated by the fact that its coast-line is less than that of 

 Britain, of one-fifteenth part its extent. Throughout Hindustan the race of man 

 is probably, in all essentials, the same, with such varieties only as prevail among 

 Europeans, Negroes, and the red man of America. The Hindus are a black people, 

 of a deeper tint than any other race of man, the African and Oriental Negro and 

 Australian excepted. The form of the head and features is European — even of the 

 highest type, the Grecian ; but experience teaches us that there must be an essen- 

 tial difierence in the quality of the two brains, although too subtle for anatomy to 

 detect. There is, in fact, no rational foundation for the extravagant theory which 

 would make Hindus and Europeans to be of one and the same race, under the absm'd 

 and hypothetical designation of Caucasian : twenty centuries of history belie the 

 assertion. Above two thousand years ago the Hindus were, according to the mea- 

 sure of Asiatic civilization, a highly advanced people, and possessing the evidences 

 of it in indigenous written language, architectural monuments, and institutions of 

 some skill and great persistency. 



We come next to the highest civilization of Asia, that of China, the joint result 

 of superiority of race and favoiu'able physical geography. The high mountain- 

 chains of China, often rising to the snow-level, and chiefly lying to the west, are the 

 sources of the great rivers which fertilize spacious alluvial plains, and nourish mil- 

 lions of men. It was no doubt in these plains that first sprang up the peculiar 

 civilization which has spread over a region twenty times the extent of Britain, and 

 numbering fully sixteen times its popiilation. With respect to the quality of the 

 race itself, it far exceeds all other Asiatic ones in bodily strength, in capacity for 

 labom", in ingenuity, and in power of supporting vicissitudes of climate, for we find 

 it thiiving alike under the heat of the equator and the cold of the fiftieth degree of 

 latitude. It is almost superfluous to add that their knowledge of letters, peculiarly 

 their own, is of immemorial antiquity. For ages, too, they have had the capacity 

 to erect gi-eat and enduring stnictiures. Their foolish wall, to keep out the shepherds 

 of Tai-tary, and compared to which, in magnitude at least, the Pyramids of Egypt 

 are but mole-hUls, was constructed two huncked years before the birth of Christ. 



