6. In their pasture they have according to their pasture, so been filled: were they filled:

14

THE 10TH CHAPTER OF GENESIS EXPLAINED;

OR, AN ESSAY

ON THE FIRST PEOPLING OF THE EARTH.

On the first peopling of the earth...... Æneas, surveying the rising city and colony of Carthage,

Jamque ascendebat collem qui plurimus urbi
Imminet, adversasque aspectat desuper arces.
Miratur molem vastam, magalia quondam.
Instant ardentes Tyrii: pars ducere muros,
Molirique arcem, et manibus subvolvere saxa;
Pars aptare locum tecto, et concludere sulco.
Hic portus alii effodiunt; hìc alta theatris
Fundamenta locant alii, immanesque columnas
Rupibus excidunt, scenis decora alta futuris.

To make a Lord Anson's voyage round the world, while it was gradually peopling, and half settled; to wander, like Ulysses, from shore to shore, from continent to continent, in pursuit, not of a contemptible Ithaca, but of the earliest Aborigines, the planters of this earth; and, as the curtain rises, and leisurely discovers them, to describe, like a second Americus-Vesputius, or Cortez, their simplicity of manners, and their ignorance of the arts; to see human nature in a condition most surprisingly differing from, and the sciences in a state most astonishingly inferior to, the sciences and the polished life so universal in modern Europe; to draw a comparison by those mediums between rude and civilised society; between the habits of the enlightened Christian, and of the dark Barbarian; between the self-instructed Mexican, and the school-taught Chinese; between the Patriarchs, roving with their herds, and the royal gardeners in Homer, tilling their own grounds; to visit the monarchs of the primitive ages, sitting under an oak, with the prince, or great chief of Otaheite, or

to listen to a royal orator, like a Canadian Sachem, haranguing a neighbouring clan of savage warriors ;—thus to coast around a world then new to man, by the assisting genius of a Camoens, or a Du Halde; of Captain Cook, or Abbé Lafitau; of Hesiod, Herodotus, Diodorus, and the grand guides of the remoter geography; Vyasa, the collector of the Vedas, and Moses, the inspired collector of the post-diluvian traditions this inquiry into the origin of the nations, must awaken, and probably may somewhat gratify, our nation of readers. Antiquam exquirite matrem, added the wise oracle, which I may be allowed to translate, "Seek the parental country of the human race, the mother of nations, the metropolis of the world." Res quidem ardua, (as Pliny observes,) vetustis novitatem dare, obsoletis nitorem, obscuris lucem, dubiis fidem. Yet guided by the hundreds of specimens, which in this age we fortunately possess of the mother-tongues, and the thousand forms of their dialects; guided by these thousand speeches of the babbling earth, as Theseus by the clue of Ariadne, though involved in a dark labyrinth; by these speeches which are witnesses and interpreters to the parental tribes, which originally peopled the centre of Upper Asia, and which attest and explain their similarity of origin, and their affinity of race;-guided by these varied languages, and their diversified dialects, I will modestly attempt to aid my readers to trace a mother-tribe through all her colonies, a mother-tongue through all her ramifications of change; as the botanist detects the resemblance in vegetable nature, however numerous the branches, or devious the roots. My readers may then follow in fancy the first tribes of the "family of man," roving from the central ridge, or its contiguous plains in Upper Asia, through all their successive separations, and all their diffused emigrations towards the four winds of heaven, even to South America, the Antipodes of Siberia, and to New South Wales, the nearest continental Antipodes to Britain. He may also ascertain, by the means of the eclipses, and the comets which are recorded in the Greek, Persian, Hindoo, and Chinese Histories, their very eras and precise dates; and thus he may as easily attend the several parent-nations and congenial clans in their several routes and journeyings, as the heart of Elijah went with his servant

Gehazi, when he privately quitted the house of his master to request of the Syrian invalid a few talents, the complimentary gift of the East. The reader will be, by chronological dates, planted as on an eminence, planted as Adam in Milton is placed by an Angel, or as Æneas above by his guardianmother Venus, whence he will see the several nations passing in review before him, and going, each (Moses adds) according to his lineage, to take possession of his destined country; Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Syrians; Scythians, Gauls, Getes; Cimmerians, Celts, Hindoos, Chinese; the future residents in Siberia, in Greenland, in America, with the ancestors even of the distant dwellers in New Holland, and in the islots of the South Sea, and "the islands of the nations," he shall hear them all speaking in their mother-tongues, at that early age remarkably similar. To prove this fact, I refer the reader,

1. To a Chart of Numerals, from 1 to 10, which was collected by me in 20 years, &c. which is now printed in this JOURNAL.

1

2. To the Preface and Dis. of Walton's Polyglott.

3. To the Dissertations of Sir W. Jones in the As. Res.
4. To Pinkerton's History of early Europe, or of the Goths
and Scythians, through the first half of the Book.

And he shall figure to himself their march over vast countries, penetrating woods and crossing seas, and toiling through extensive deserts, each toward their "promised land," to the region, which in the next thirty years they would affectionately call their mother-country, the land of their fathers' sepulcre. " And how interesting it is (to borrow three sentences from the pathetic St. Pierre) thus to learn all the history of the ancient separation of peoples; the motives which induced each tribe to choose a separate habitation on a globe unknown, and to traverse, as chance or fate directed, mountains which presented no path, and rivers which had not yet received a name. What pictures may be presented to us in the delineation of those countries, decorated with the rude magnificence of dark groves, or burning volcanoes, as they proceeded from the hand of nature, but wild and unadapted to the necessities of man, destitute of experience? We may paint the astonishment of these strangers on

the earth, of these forefathers of our race, at the sight of the new plants, which every new climate exhibited to the view, and the trials which they made of them as the means of subsistence; how they were aided (as, according to Moses, Adam was assisted in the instance of clothing) in all their necessities, and in their industry, by a superior intelligence, or a Providence, who pitied their distress; how they gradually formed an establishment, and what was the origin of their laws, customs, religion, and polity."

Of all the pages of philosophical history, none deserves more to be read with earnest curiosity than those, which display these nascent energies of the human race; and such is the work of "Sabbathier on the Ancient Nations," a literal collection from the classics; such are the "History and Antiquities. of India," and of China, by the Rev. J. Maurice, or the Historical Dissertations on the Asiatic Peoples,' by Sir William Jones; or the Life of Charles the Fifth, and the Rise of Europe from Gothic darkness, by Dr. Robertson; or the two humbler, but equally useful, works, the volumes of the "Ancient Universal History," and in the Spanish and Italian tongues, the voluminous Annals and Voyages of De Gama, Albuquerque, and other conquerors of India. These authors explore the beginnings of civilisation; that singular period in the progress of mind is by them plainly subjected to the observation of this wise and learned age. The account of the first population, tillage, measurement of the plains of Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Indostan, and China, are by them recovered from oblivion: no longer the circumstances of the Coptic and Phoenician Colonies in Greece, of Greek and Lydian settlements in Magna Græcia, and in Hetruria, of our Celtic ancestors in France, and our Teutonic fathers in Germany, remain unknown. Bochart in his Phaleg, Pinkerton in his Goths, or Scythians, and a thousand antiquaries on the ages of Welsh and Irish paganism, have opened to astonished Europe her earliest annals. And a perusal in Du Halde, of the histories and the moral code of so self-instructed a race as the Chinese, united with that of their penal laws, lately translated into our tongue, or the more obvious perusal of all the late authors in United America, on their voyages and travels across the breadth of the New World, on their wise laws and isolated policy, on their improvements of the new Western VOL. IV. No. vII.

B.