218 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



West of Central Asia, all records agree in pointing to the 

 east for the direction whence nations migrated. Only three 

 exceptions occur, where the course was a return homewards 

 from anterior progression. Such was the Hebrew from Egypt 

 to Palestine, the Ionian from Greece to Asia Minor, and the 

 Nogay Tahtar from Russia to China. If the Egyptians, led 

 by a Sesostris, penetrated to Bactria, a fabulous Bacchus to 

 India, the Gauls to Greece and Galatia, and the Macedonians 

 to the Punjab, beyond the Indus, they were mere conquering 

 inroads, which lasted only for a few generations, sustained in 

 some degree by the aboriginal homogeneousness of the invaders 

 with the races in possession of the land. The pseudo-Greek 

 kingdoms, notwithstanding the great national influx of that 

 people in Western Asia, had no permanent tenure ; and the 

 Romans, the Crusaders, and the modern French, have only 

 produced military occupations, not national colonizations. 

 None are historically known to have departed from the inter- 

 Pontine Caucasus, though many came westward, by the route 

 of Armenia, with more or less delay in that high region, because 

 the avenues leading south and west, from both sides of the 

 Caspian, to Asia Minor, Syria, and Africa, mainly pass through 

 it.* 



Had the first population of mankind radiated from the Ara- 

 rat of Armenia (for the word is generical),t all the present 

 nations of the west, whose great movements are historically 

 traceable to the high Oxus and Jaxartes (such as the Gomerian 

 Celtse, and the Indo-Germans, Yuchi and Sacae), would have 

 travelled, without being pressed in the rear, across deserts, up 

 great rivers and high mountain ranges, before they multiplied, 

 for no other purpose than to return over the same ground, that 



* Of course, the dispersion of the Jews eastward, and some more recent 

 forcible transpositions of western Caucasian tribes to high Asia, are not 

 here regarded. 



tin the Circassian tongue, Ararat, Arak, or Areck, simply denctc a 

 peak. 



