THE HUMAN SPECIES. 411 



aclidae were of the fair-haired stock, and so was Theseus, and 

 indeed most of the demigod heroes of Greece ; at least that 

 opinion in tradition is equivalent to an admission of the fact 

 that the northern race prevailed among the Hellenes before 

 their historical era. They came from Thrace, from Asia 

 Minor; and, in the quality of marine swarmers down the 

 Euxine, occupied portions of the coast, or passed on to the 

 Mediterranean, to the Adriatic, Gaul, and Spain, where the 

 fabulous Gerion is again represented to have been a fair-haired 

 giant.* All these legends have a singular alliance in consist- 

 ent uniformity, reaching to Egypt, and going round and beyond 

 the Mediterranean Sea. Under the names of Scythians and 

 Tauranians, we find, in Asiatic history, that they were dreaded 

 by all southern nations, even to a single individual coming 

 amongst them. Kindred nations of this stem reached Europe 

 without distinct accounts of their origin and progress; but the 

 movements of others, at later periods, substantiated by Chinese 

 writers, by Indian documents, and by Greek and Latin authors, 

 who record their arrival in the west, attest that they all came 

 from the same region, in Mongolia, Thibet, and the lakes of 

 Central Asia. Being coerced by the pressure of the beardless 

 stock behind, they forced a passage towards Europe through 

 innumerable fields of slaughter, and swarmed during a period 

 commencing probably twelve centuries B. C, perhaps when the 

 great inland sea was already much contracted, and the rivers 

 in their way were not yet so greatly absorbed in sand as they 

 are now. 



We observe, in fact, that already at the time of the first 

 Celtic expansion in Gaul, when tribes of that race recrossed the 



*In Asia Minor they appear to have constituted the Lydian, Pelasgian, 

 and Carian nations ; and Tyrhenian orTorubian, and Phoenician, further 

 on, were probably more Finnic, but all allied, as is shown by Hesiod and 

 Herodotus, in Lydian records ; and Ovid, quoting a Naxian legend, where 

 tribes are personified, the Tyrhenian theft of the god Bacchus, indicates 

 that these pirate rovers carried the vine to Italy. 



