THE FIFTH

ANNIVERSARY DISCOURSE,

DELIVERED 21 FEBRUARY, 1788.

BY

THE PRESIDENT.

AT the clofe of my last address to you, Gentlemen, I declared my design of introducing to your notice a people of Afia, who seemed as different in most respects from the Hindus and Arabs, as those two nations had been shown to differ from each other; I meaned the people, whom we call Tartars: but I enter with extreme diffidence on my present subject, because I have little knowledge of the Tartarian dialects; and the grofs errours of European writers on Afiatick literature have long convinced me, that no fatisfactory account can be given of any nation, with whose language we are not perfectly acquainted. Such evidence, however, as I have procured by attentive reading and scrupulous inquiries, I will now lay before you, interfperfing such remarks as I could not but make on that evidence, and fubmitting the whole to your impartial decifion.

Conformably to the method before adopted in describing Arabia and India, I confider Tartary alfo, for the purpose of this discourse, on its most extensive scale, and request your attention, whilft I trace the largest boundaries that are affignable to it: conceive a line drawn from the mouth of the Oby to that of the Dnieper, and, bringing it back eastward across the Euxine, fo as to include the peninfula of Krim, extend it along the foot of Caucafus, by the rivers Cur and Aras, to the Cafpian lake, from the oppofite shore of which follow the course of the Jaihun' and the chain of Caucafean hills as far as thofe of Imaus: whence continue the line beyond the Chinese wall to the White Mountain and the country of Yetfo; skirting the borders of Perfia, India, China, Corea, but including part of Russia, with all the districts which lie between the Glacial fea, and that of Japan. M. DE GUIGNES, whose great work on the Huns abounds more in folid learning than in rhetorical ornaments, presents us, however, with a magnificent image of this wide region; defcribing it as a ftupendous edifice, the beams and pillars of which are many ranges of lofty hills, and the dome, one prodigious mountain, to which the Chinese give the epithet of Celestial, with a confiderable number of broad rivers flowing down its fides: if the mansion be so amazingly fublime, the land around it is proportionably extended, but more wonderfully diversified; for some parts of it are incrufted with ice, others parched with inflamed air and covered with a kind of lava; here we meet with immense tracts of fandy deserts and forests almost impenetrable; there, with gardens, groves, and meadows, perfumed with mufk, watered by numberlefs rivulets, and abounding in fruits and flowers; and, from east to weft, lie many confiderable provinces, which appear as valleys in comparison of the hills towering above them, but in truth are the flat fummits of the highest mountains in the world, or at least the highest in Afia. Near one fourth in latitude of this extraordinary region is in the fame charming climate with Greece, Italy, and Provence; and another fourth in that

of

of England, Germany, and the northern parts of France; but the Hyperborean countries can have few beauties to recommend them, at least in the present state of the earth's temperature: to the fouth, on the frontiers of Iràn are the beautiful vales of Soghd with the celebrated cities of Samarkand and Bokhárà; on those of Tibet are the territories of Cafhghar, Khoten, Chegil and Khátà, all famed for perfumes and for the beauty of their inhabitants; and on those of China lies the country of Chin, anciently a powerful kingdom, which name, like that of Khátà, has in modern times been given to the whole Chinese empire, where fuch an appellation would be thought an insult. We must not omit the fine territory of Tancut, which was known to the Greeks by the name of Serica, and confidered by them as the fartheft eastern extremity of the habitable globe.

Scythia feems to be the general name, which the ancient Europeans gave to as much as they knew of the country thus bounded and described; but, whether that word be derived, as PLINY feems to intimate, from Sacai, a people known by a fimilar name to the Greeks and Perfians, or, as BRYANT imagines, from Cuthia, or, as Colonel VALLANCEY believes, from words denoting navigation, or, as it might have been fuppofed, from a Greek root implying wrath and ferocity, this at least is certain, that as India, China, Perfia, Japan, are not appellations of those countries in the languages of the nations, who inhabit them, so neither Scythia nor Tartary are names, by which the inhabitants of the country now under our confideration have ever diftinguished themselves. Tátáristàn is, indeed, a word used by the Perfians for the fouth-western part of Scythia, where the musk-deer is said to be common; and the name Tátàr is by some confidered as that of a particular tribe; by others, as that of a small river only; while Túràn, as opposed to Iràn, seems to mean the ancient dominion of AFRA'SIA B to the north and eaft of the Oxus. There is nothing more

idle than a debate concerning names, which after all are of little confequence, when our ideas are diftinct without them: having given, therefore, a correct notion of the country, which I proposed to examine, I fhall not fcruple to call it by the general name of Tartary; though I am confcious of using a term equally improper in the pronunciation and the application of it.

Tartary then, which contained, according to PLINY, an innumerable multitude of nations, by whom the rest of Afia and all Europe has in different ages been over-run, is denominated, as various images have prefented themselves to various fancies, the great hive of the northern fwarms, the nursery of irresistible legions, and, by a stronger metaphor, the foundery of the human race; but M. BAILLY, a wonderfully ingenious man and a very lively writer, seems first to have confidered it as the cradle of our Species, and to have fupported an opinion, that the whole ancient world was enlightened by fciences brought from the most northern parts of Scythia, particularly from the banks of the Jenifea, or from the Hyperborean regions: all the fables of old Greece, Italy, Perfia, India, he derives from the north; and it must be owned, that he maintains his paradox with acuteness and learning. Great learning and great acuteness, together with the charms of a most engaging style, were indeed necessary to render even tolerable a system, which places an earthly paradise, the gardens of Hesperus, the islands of the Macares, the groves of Elyfium, if not of Eden, the heaven of INDRA, the Peristàn, or fairy-land, of the Perfian poets, with its city of diamonds and its country of Shádcàm, fo named from Pleafure and Love, not in any climate, which the common fenfe of mankind confiders as the feat of delights, but beyond the mouth of the Oby, in the Frozen Sea, in a region equalled only by that, where the wild imagination of DANTE led him to fix the worst of criminals in a state of punishment after death, and of which he could not, he fays, even think without shivering. A

very curious paffage in a tract of PLUTARCH on the figure in the Moon's orb, naturally induced M. BAILLY to place Ogygia in the north, and he concludes that island, as others have concluded rather fallaciously, to be the Atlantis of PLATO, but is at a lofs to determine, whether it was Ifeland or Grænland, Spitzberg or New Zembla: among fo many charms it was difficult, indeed, to give a preference; but our philofopher, though as much perplexed by an option of beauties as the fhepherd of Ida, seems on the whole to think Zembla the most worthy of the golden fruit; because it is indisputably an island, and lies oppofite to a gulph near a continent, from which a great number of rivers descend into the ocean. He appears equally diftreffed among five nations, real and imaginary, to fix upon that, which the Greeks named Atlantes ; and his conclufion in both cafes muft remind us of the fhowman at Eton, who, having pointed out in his box all the crowned heads of the world, and being asked by the schoolboys, who looked through the glafs, which was the Emperor, which the Pope, which the Sultan, and which the Great Mogul, answered eagerly, which 'which you please, 'young gentlemen, which you please.' His letters, however, to VOLTAIRE, in which he unfolds his new fyftem to his friend, whom he had not been able to convince, are by no means to be derided; and his general propofition, that arts and sciences had their fource in Tartary, deferves a longer examination than can be given to it in this difcourfe: I shall, nevertheless, with your permiffion, fhortly difcufs the queftion under the several heads, that will present themselves in order.

Although we may naturally suppose, that the numberless communities of Tartars, fome of whom are established in great cities, and fome encamped on plains in ambulatory manfions, which they remove from pafture to pasture, must be as different in their features as in their dialects, yet, among those who have not emigrated into another country and mixed with another nation, we may discern a family like

nefs,