11 



to make known the principal conclusions with respect to philo- 

 logy, ethnography, and the natural history of man, — it will be 

 seen that the countries more immediately surrounding that cen- 

 tral point, — namely, Assyria, Chaldea, Egypt, Phoenicia, and 

 Asia Minor, — are those whose inhabitants were in the earliest 

 ages possessed of the highest degree of culture ; whilst, on the 

 other hand, at the points most distant from the same centre, the 

 Papuans, the Hottentots, the Esquimaux, and other savage races 

 have degenerated almost to the lowest state compatible with the 

 retention of rational endowments. 



A second principle resulting from the same hypothesis is, that 

 (except where invasions have introduced foreign tribes, as in the 

 case of the Hindoos in India) the more degenerate races, whose 

 positions are considerably removed from the centre, must have 

 derived their origin from that centre through the medium of 

 the more civilized people geographically situate between it and 

 them, and must consequently have received from them their 

 languages, their religion, and their customs ; although, in con- 

 sequence of the recession from the centre of these more degene- 

 rate races, and their gradual corruption and debasement, the 

 changes in all those particulars, as well as in their physical 

 structure and appearance, may have become such as to render 

 it a task of the utmost difficulty to trace the resemblance and 

 the connexion between them and their more civilized ancestors. 

 Thus the primitive inhabitants of the whole of Southern and 

 Eastern Asia must have sprung from ancestors who originally 

 occupied the countries situate to the northward of the Persian 

 Gulf: so the aborigines of Africa must be descended from the 

 earliest settlers of Arabia, Ethiopia, and Egypt ; whilst the tribes 

 who peopled the islands and continent of Europe, and who from 

 thence also spread themselves eastward into the northern por- 

 tions of Asia, must have had their origin in Asia Minor. 



It is also to be inferred, that where different races have, in 

 their corresponding removal from the centre, undergone a cor- 

 responding degradation, at the same time that they have been 

 subjected to the operation of similar physical conditions, the 

 results will be analogous in those races, both with respect to 

 their physical conformation and as regards their moral and in- 



