THE HUMAN SPECIES. 417 



develop 3cience with daily increasing rapidity, and tending 

 shortly to embrace the whole earth. 



Though many of the parent races of nations now remaining 

 were without letters, or were possessed of valuable elements 

 of knowledge in a very circumscribed degree, there existed 

 among them all, at a period much earlier than is often allowed, 

 a method of embodying (it is true, commonly under symbolical 

 expressions) records of national belief, manners, and events, 

 which give occasional light, sufficient to rectify the scanty 

 data of the later classical writers, and the documents contained 

 in the acts of the earlier ages of Christianity. These most 

 ancient national legends are poems, in various forms, and 

 often in some part religious. They are reports, such as Virgil 

 knew, and interwove in his iEneid, concerning the tribes of 

 Latium, and Strabo asserts were possessed by the Iberians. 

 They were recitals committed to memory, like the Homeric 

 poems, preserved from one generation to another by repetition, 

 with an exactness, all things considered, wonderfully perma- 

 nent. Thus the Gael of the Scottish Highlands, and northern 

 Irish, have recorded the poems of Ossian, now thoroughly 

 proved to be genuine. Such are the thirty cantos of the 

 Finnic Kalewalla, lately brought to light, the numerous Scan- 

 dinavian Sagas, and the two Eddas. Even the British Celtic 

 legends of Arthur, the Mabinogion, and the poems of Taliesin 

 and Aneurim, have now likewise established their degree of 

 authenticity, as well as the first part of the Arabic Antar. 

 Among the Teutonic tribes, the staves of the Gehugende, 

 according to Jahn, marked on wood, in Runic letters, con- 

 tained the tribal reminiscences, whence the earliest monkish 

 annalirts have drawn a great part of their first historical mate- 

 rials. The Heldenbuch, and Niebelungen-noth, were most 

 likely p eserved by their help. The last mentioned may, 

 however be of Franco-Theotisk origin, since four or six pages, 

 in the Flemish language, of the twelfth century, have been 

 lately discovered at Ghent. 



