NEW EMPIRE OF ABYSSINIA. 4^: 



fertility those of Flanders and the Ukraine, watered by two great 

 rivers and two hundred rivulets or permanent streams which, skiK 

 fully economized, everywhere sustain vegetation and life. At the^ 

 foot of the mountains, a yellow, bare, stony and undulating plain,, 

 covered with gum trees and other thorny shrubs, extends to the sea» 

 its sands and dry beds of torrents, where some thousands of nomads 

 seek for scanty pasture and waters, not unfrequently brackish. The 

 burning air breathed in these regions is fatal to the AbyssinianSj, 

 who there meet the dreaded nefas, tlje deadly fever of the low-lying 

 grounds : on this account, they do not appear, for ages, to have made 

 any lasting establishment upon it. It is true that the same physical 

 cause which forbids their conquest of Soudon has always been their 

 protection against their Mahommedan neighbours of the Nile or the- 

 Eed Sea. 



The Abyssinian race is not more African than the country it in- 

 habits. In features, mind, qualities, and defects, and, above all, in 

 perfectibility, this people is allied to the Caucasian race, and that,, 

 unquestionably, closer than the Hindoos or the Persians, In this 

 relationshship lies a series of mysteries, which I content myself with, 

 pointing out to the true lovers of ethnological problems. All else ia 

 obscure in the origin of this nation, which religious prejudices have 

 led to give itself a Hebrew derivation, that critical history does not 

 accept. The first home of indigenous civilization was Axum in the 

 province of Tigre, a name extended by degrees to all Abyssinia east 

 of the river Takazze. The establishment of Christianity, of commu- 

 nication with the Greeks of Alexandria, and even with the Eoman 

 empire itself, the conquest of Arabia Felix, all date from this brilliant 

 period of the Axumite kings, still powerful at the time of the Cru- 

 sades. The removal of the capital to Gondar, a little later, marked 

 the decline of the Tigreens and the supremacy assumed by the Am- 

 haras, a strong, hardy, and warlike race who appear to have come 

 from the south, in the region about the equator, and who assimilated 

 to themselves the religion, manners, civilization, and, to a certain 

 extent, the language of the subjugated people. At the present tiraOj 

 the recollections of this conquest are, happily, effaced — thanks to the 

 necessity in which the Abyssinian people found themselves of vigorous, 

 concentration, in order to resist the great Mahommedan states which 

 attacked their country upon the east and west, and the hordes of 

 heathen and savage Gallas who overspread it upon the south. 



