% On the BORDERERS, MOUNTAINEERS, 



PerJIa, India, China* and Canary ; over the wild tribes reflding in the 

 mountainous parts of thofe extendve regions ; and the more civilized inha- 

 bitants of the iflands. annexed by. geographers to their AJiatick divifion o£ 

 this globe . 



Let us take our departure from Hume near the gulf of Elanitis, and;. 

 having encircled Afia, with fuch deviations from our courfe as the fubjecl 

 may require, let us. return to the point, from which we began; endeavour* 

 ing, if we are able, to find a nation, who may clearly be mown, by juft 

 reafoning from their language, religion, and manners, to be neither Indians-, 

 Arabs, nor Tartars, pure or mixed ; but always remembering, that any 

 fmall family detached in an early age from their parent flock, without letters* 

 with few ideas beyond objects of the firfl necefiity, and confequently witb 

 few words, and fixing their abode on a range of mountains, in an iflandj, 

 or even in a wide region before uninhabited, might in four or five centuries 

 people their new country, and would neceffarily forma new language with 

 no perceptible traces, perhaps, of that fpoken by their anceftors. Edom 

 ©r Idume, and Erythra or Phcenice, had originally,, as many believe, a fimilar 

 meaning, and were derived from words denoting a red colour % but, whatever 

 be their derivation, it feems indubitable, thata race of men were, anciently* 

 fettled in Idume and in Midian, -whom the older! and belt: Greek authors call 

 Erythreans ; who were very diftincl from the Arabs; and whom, from the 

 concurrence of many flrong teftimonies, we may fafely refer to the Indian 

 item. M. D* Herbelot mentions a tradition, (which he treats, indeed, as a 

 fable) that a colony of thofe Idumeans had migrated from the northern mores, 

 of the Erythrean fea, and failed acrofs the Mediterranean to Europe, at the- 

 iime fixed by Chronologers for thepaffageof Ev a nder with his Arcadians into, 

 Italy t and that both Greeks <md 'Remans- were the progeny of thofe emigrants t 



