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tions of that peninsula, and in the people found in greater 

 numbers towards its southern extremity; whose languages, of 

 a totally distinct character from the Sanscrit and its derivative 

 dialects, plainly point to the separate origin of those people 

 from that of the Japhthitish Hindoos. 



It is to this division of mankind that I conceive the designa- 

 tion of Semitic or Shemitish ought properly to be applied ; and 

 within this division must also be comprised the whole of the 

 aboriginal inhabitants of the Indian Archipelago, of Polynesia, 

 and likewise of America; but upon the subject of these people 

 I will refrain from enlarging, as the grounds upon which the 

 classification of the varieties of the human species has been 

 attempted in this paper are intended to be essentially philolo- 

 gical, and that department of knowledge does not (as far as I 

 am acquainted with it) afford sufficient data upon which the 

 proposed classification should be thus far extended. 



When, however, our philological knowledge shall become yet 

 further enlarged, it will be seen whether or not all the languages 

 of the earth, and the people speaking them, are referrible to the 

 three distinct divisions which have thus been enumerated ; and 

 it will also be definitively ascertained whether these divisions of 

 languages are, like the distinct races of mankind to whom they 

 belong, reducible to one common source. With respect to the 

 former of these questions, there is good reason to believe that, 

 sooner or later, it will be determined in the affirmative; but 

 with regard to the latter of them, the opinion of philologists is 

 already very decidedly in the negative. If this be established, 

 we shall be compelled to have recourse to an original forma- 

 tion of more than one primitive tongue ; an hypothesis which 

 in reality is attended with no greater difficulty than that of the 

 original formation of a single language. 



Printed by Tayloe and Fbakcis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. 



