2 Some conjectures on the progress of [Jan. 



differences and yet the co-existant affinities of those races constitute 

 one of the strangest, and most interesting subjects of human study. 

 Identity exists among them, in the radical formation of language, with 

 a total variance of custom ; while in another case, custom and appa- 

 rent habits are identical, with a difference of the very system of speech, 

 irreconcileable as yet by any current theories in philology. The most 

 striking of these instances, is perhaps, that of the ancient Egyptians, 

 and the modern Hindoos, whose affinity of customs is indisputable, 

 even to the institution of castes, and segregation ; whose distinctive 

 dress is precisely similar ; — whose symbolic representations of deities 

 in many instances correspond wonderfully ; and who indeed to any one 

 that looks observingly on the memorials of the extinct nation, while resid- 

 ing among the extant one, present in their modes and habits of life, of 

 labour, — the shape of tools, boats, and utensils, and a hundred minutiae 

 of fact speaking to the eye, but tedious and trifling to detail, the appear- 

 ance of one people. But if between two races that reckon the periods of 

 their substantive existence, not by centuries but by milliads, there still 

 abide in the one that lives, after the contingent influences of so many revo- 

 lutions, so striking a resemblance to that one which nationally exists no 

 more how much greater must not that similarity have been in times when 

 both flourished, powerful and independent, at a period long anterior to 

 the records of written history, in contemporaneous greatness ? Now if 

 on the one hand, the Egyptian hath left us (save in the papyri the 

 examination of which is in its infancy) no historical record of himself 

 beyond what lie in temples and in tombs, with their remains of art, 

 their pictures, and their half-read hieroglyphics, — so on the other does 

 the Hindoo, with an extant literature, vouchsafe us little or nothing of 

 the definitely historical, amid much acute philosophy, much gorgeous 

 poetry, mystical and imaginative theology, and legislation of a singular 

 wisdom, fitted only for a highly civilized people. But, on either hand, 

 meagre though to the historical interest of the lists of Egyptian kings, 

 and all apocryphal the romance of Hindoo heroic poetry, we have 

 fortunately preserved with each the representation of a people, whom 

 chronology helps us in setting juxta-posed in the zenith of their power 

 at corresponding periods. If then after a lapse, say, of two thousand 

 years, the one race still be similar to that other which exists no more, 

 while its records of things done anterior to that time, prove usages and 



