80 INTBODUCnON. 



of the human race to Certain lofty mountain chains. The birth-place 

 of the men who peopled Europe and Western Asia ia supposed to 

 have been Mount Caucasus ; hence the term "Cauca ipplied 



to them. The nations of Eastern Asia were derived from the neigh- 

 borhood iif .Mount Altai; and the African Negroes from the southern 

 face of the chain of Mount Alias. The tradition in the Hebrew 

 Scriptures places the birth-place of mankind on the banks of lour 

 great rivers, two of which have been recognized as the Tigris and 

 Euphrates, in a land rich in animal and vegetable productions. 

 Prichard recognizes three great centres of the earliest civilization of 

 the human race, comprising most of the tribes known to antiquity. 

 " In one of these, the Semitic or Syro-Arabian nations exchanged 

 the simple habits of wandering shepherds for the splendor and lux- 

 ury of Nineveh and Babylon. In a second, the Indo-European or 

 lapctic people brought to perfection the most elaborate of human 

 dialects, destined to become, in after times and under different modi- 

 fications, the mother tongue of the nations of Europe. In a third, 

 the land of Ilarn, watered by the Nile, were invented hieroglyphics] 

 literature and the arts, in which Egypt far surpassed all the rest of 

 the world in the earlier ages of history." 



These three divisions do not correspond to the three departments 

 of mankind as indicated by the form of the skull ; the former were 

 neither nomades nor savages, but were more or less civilized and 

 had the corresponding oval form of skull. Yet he would tr 

 gradual deviation from this type to the lower, e. g., from the Egyp- 

 tian to the Negro, without any decided interruption ; though he 

 admits " that these approximations require further inquiry and more 

 precise proofs before they can be admitted as furnishing the ground- 

 work of an ethnological system." 



His Syro-Arabian or Semitic race includes the Syrians, the Jews, 

 the Arabs. According to Baron Larrey, the Arabian race fur- 

 nishes the most perfect type of the human head, and he believes 

 " that the cradle of the human family is to be found in the country of 

 this race." 



The Egyptian or Hamitic race contrasts strongly with the Se- 

 mitic, the latter being full of energy and restless activity, the former 

 living in luxurious ease on the rich soil watered by the Nile. They 

 are equally different in their intellectual and moral characters ; the 

 one still living in its energetic and ever-roving descendants, the 

 «ther reposing in its own land, which is little else than a vast 

 sepulchre. According to Denon, the Egyptians display the " gen- 

 uine African character, of which the Negro is the exaggerated and 

 extreme representation." Some have called the Egyptians Negroes ; 



