﻿I. 



THE FOURTH 

 ANNIVERSARY DISCOURSE, 



DELIVERED 15 FEBRUARY, 1787, 



BY THE PRESIDENT. 



Gentlemen, 



I HAD the honour last year of opening to you 

 my intention to discourse at our annual meetings 

 on the five principal nations who have peopled the 

 continent and islands of Asia, so as to trace, by an 

 historical and philological analysis, the number of 

 ancient stems from which those five branches have 

 severally sprung, and the central region from which 

 they appear to have proceeded ; you may, therefore, 

 expect that, having submitted to your consideration a 

 few general remarks on the old inhabitants of India, I 

 should now offer my sentiments on some other nation, 

 who, from a similarity of language, religion, arts, and 

 manners, may be supposed to have had an early con- 

 nection with the Hindus; but, since we find some 

 Asiatic nations totally dissimilar to them in all or most 

 of those particulars, and since the difference will 

 strike you more forcibly by an immediate and close 

 comparison, I design at present to give a short ac- 

 count of a wonderful people, who seem in every 

 respect so strongly contrasted to the original natives 

 of -this country, that they must have been for ages a 

 distinct.and separate race 

 Vol. Ii. B 



