sert, during the extended and peaceful reign of that great patriarch, the renovated genius of man had ample time and opportunity to improve and expand itself: here virtue exulted in the fostering smile of a pious sovereign, and science shot up vigorously beneath the protecting wing of power, invested at once with the PATERNAL, the PATRIARCHAL, and the REGAL, authority. The arguments, however,

which have been adduced by these writers in favour of their darling hypothesis, and which I shall faithfully present to the reader in my History, are specious, but not solid; ingenious, but not convincing. If they possessed still greater speciousness and still more refined ingenuity, they would be totally inadmissible, since they oppose the tenor of that Sacred Book, by which all Christians are bound to regulate their belief, since they are repugnant to the whole stream of tradition, and since they are made in direct contradiction to an infinite variety of evidence, engraved on the medals and monuments of Asia, of undoubted authenticity and of the most venerable antiquity. The system which I have to propose, and which, from a few fragments in antient writers, I shall, in the Indian History, endeavour to establish, by no means opposes Scripture, violates probability,

VOL. V.

I i

probability, or outrages common sense and received tradition. It reaches nearly the same end and establishes facts nearly similar, with-` out referring to such harsh and improbable means; and, if it does not allow that extended point of latitude to the claims to remote antiquity of the Hindoo nation, which the former hypothesis does, in point of date, yet it falls only about a century short of that hypothesis. In fact, it nearly ascends to the utmost point of all genuine chronology in India, the commencement of the CALI-YUG, or present age of the world's duration.

For the outlines of the system which I have adopted, I profess myself indebted to the profound investigation of Mr BRYANT, concerning the migration and dispersion of nations. Throughout that most elaborate performance, I have endeavoured to avail myself of many useful and important hints, which the SOLID JUDGEMENT and DEEP ERUDITION of the author, when unwarped by a brilliant fancy, enable him to afford the historian. From arguments which I shall hereafter endeavour to extend and amplify, Mr BRYANT insists upon a migration of the several branches of the great family that survived the deluge, LONG ANTECEDENT to the con

fusion of tongues at Babel and the consequent supposed dispersion of all mankind. That migration, he labours to demonstrate, took place, not from the plain of Shinar, but from the region of Ararat, where the ark rested. He contends, that neither the confusion of tongues nor the dispersion itself was universal, but would confine those two circumstances to the daring and rebellious race who were engaged in the erection of that stupendous monument of human ambition and folly, the tower of Babel. His arguments are particularly forcible on that point, so truly important, if indeed that point can be established on a solid basis in a historical inquiry like the present, concerning the antiquity and disputed priority of the different Asiatic nations; some authors contending for the superior antiquity of the Scythians or Tartars, some for the Chinese, and others for the Indians. Mr Bryant's idea is, that, by the term confounding the language, we ought to understand merely the confounding of the lip or mode of pronunciation; and this labial failure he afterwards explains, by describing it as an utter inability to speak clearly and intelligibly, an incapacity to articulate their words.*

*

Analysis of Antient Mythology, vol. iii. p. 31.

With respect to the asserted dispersion of the human race from that spot over the whole earth, he avers from authorities, which I must also hereafter adduce, with, some additional observations of an Indian kind, and relative to the Sanscreet annals, that the Hebrew word COL ARETZ, translated the whole earth, will likewise bear a very different translation that the word COL is often used in the sense of every, and that ARETZ, though frequently meant to express the earth, occurs continually in the Old Testament in the signification of land or province; as in the remarkable and pertinent instance of Aretz Shinar, the land of Shinar; Aretz Canaan, the land of Canaan; Aretz Cush, the land of Cush; and, he observes, the Psalmist uses both the terms precisely in the sense here attributed to them. Their sound is genè out into every land; Col Aretz, in omnem terram.*

When I first commenced this undertaking, I ingenuously acknowledge that the expensive volumes of Mr Bryant were not in my possession; and, when I was at Oxford, I had but cursorily inspected that learned work. Convinced, however, that the pure primæval theo

Psalm xix. verse 4.

logy

logy of India, as described by Sir William Jones, and as, throughout this Dissertation, faithfully represented by myself, could only be derived from the genuine unadulterated principles that distinguished the virtuous line of SHEM, yet, staggered by the universal prevalence in India, as well in antient as in modern periods, of the gross and multiform idolatry of HAM, I remained for a long time involved in the deepest suspense and in the most painful perplexity. The farther I advanced in these Indian researches, the more striking appeared the contrast; the wider and more irreconcilable the difference. Educated, however, in principles that taught me to look to Chaldæa as to the PARENT-COUNTRY of the world, the nurse of rising arts, and the fountain whence human knowledge has flowed by various channels through all the kingdoms of the earth; at the same time, confounded by the authenticated accounts which have, within these few years, been imported into Europe, of the great proficiency of the Indians in the noblest and most abstruse sciences, when the greatest part of Asia had scarcely even emerged from barbarism, and when all Europe lay buried in intellectual darkness; I was just on the point of throwing away my pen and giving

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