﻿ON THE CHINESE. 381 



tial class, and advanced farther eastward than the Chi- 

 nas, have, like them, insensibly changed their fea- 

 tures and characters by intermarriages with various 

 Tartarian tribes, whom they found loosely scattered 

 over their isles, or who afterwards fixed their abode in 

 them. 



Having now shown in five discourses, that the 

 Arabs and Tartars were orignally distinct races, while 

 the Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese proceeded from 

 another ancient stem, and that all the three stems may 

 be traced ro Iran, as to a common centre, from which 

 it is highly probable that they diverged in variousdirec- 

 tions about four thousand years ago, I may seem to 

 have accomplished my design of investigating the ori- 

 gin of the Asiatic nations ; but the questions which I 

 undertook to discuss, are not yet ripe for a strict analy- 

 tical argument ; and it will first be necessary to exa- 

 mine with scrupulous attention all the detached or 

 insulated races of men, who either inhabit the borders 

 of India, Arabia, Tartary, Persia, and China, or are 

 interspersed in the mountainous and uncultivated parts 

 of those extensive regions* To this examination I 

 shall, at our next annual meeting, allot an entire dis- 

 course; and if, after all our inquiries, no more than 

 three primitive races can be found, it will be a subse- 

 quent consideration whether those three stocks had one 

 common root ; and, if they had, by what means that 

 root was preserved amid the violent shocks which our 

 whole globe appears evidently to have sustained. 



