lviii Appendix. 
ethnological considerations ; these, therefore, should be touched on here as 
slightly as possible. I will consequently only trouble you in this direction by 
stating that one author suggests the populating of Madagascar by storm-driven 
Malay proas; but physical geography is entirely against this theory. Another 
suggests the sinking of the earth's surface, so that what was once dry land is now 
the deep ocean ; but the teachings of geology forbid this within the period 
required, for the deltas of the Ganges, Indus, Euphrates, and Zambesi prove 
that practical quiescence has reigned for these last 100,000 years, while much 
under that period is abundance for the displacement or movement of races 
that we have to enquire into. 
In primitive races slave-hunting is the first necessity, for by it they obtain 
ministers to their ease and lust; mercantile adventure follows. Archaic 
Hindustan, as one of the most prolific nurseries of the human race, would 
soon have recourse to these great causes of migration and conquest. Lesser 
ranges than that shown in Plate IIT. existed in full force up to within very 
recent times, and yet in a curtailed manner exist, viz, in the Indian 
Archipelago, whose basis is in Mindanao, and on the east coast of Africa, 
whose basis is in Yemen. That the Malagasi migration had taken place from 
archaie India before the age of letters, their want of literature proves ; for 
we may accept it as an axiom that letters once attained to by a race are never 
lost. "Thus two or more small tribes in Sumatra have letters peculiar to them- 
selves, and the small island of Bali, near Java, has preserved for ages not 
only a Hindu literature, but a dead language—this against the assaults of ' 
Mahommedan zeal and Christian power. 
Then, if the migration from South Hindustan to Madagascar took place 
before the age of letters, we have an indication of its antiquity by the cuneiform 
letters and hieroglyphies of Assyria and Egypt, whose crude attempts at 
recording words or deeds date not beyond 3,400 years. At that time South 
India, or Hindustan, would be extending her expeditions east and west, she 
being the great centre of trade, and, having the necessities, would also at the 
same time acquire letters of her own, or borrow them from those close 
neighbours. That her trade expanded, we may judge by the date of the 
foundation of Tyre by those great East Indian merchants, the Phoenicians, 
3,120 years ago ; and that the powerful and wealthy partook of or used their 
merchandize we may judge of by the Song of Solomon, which, 2,900 years ago, 
celebrated the camphire of Sumatra and the cinnamon of Ceylon, whose chief 
marts were South India.* Thus the fossil words of Barata were planted westward 
* Vasco da Gama, the first direct European trader to India, at the end of the 
fifteenth century found the stores of Cannanor, Calicut, and Cochin filled with pepper, 
ginger, nutmegs, cloves, etc., the produce of South India, as well as of Sumatra, Java, 
the Moluccas, etc. He also found a Hindoo trader on the coast of Africa, as far south as 
