riage, over well-constructed roads; worked the metals; plied the loom; moulded clay into pottery; and even navigated the neighboring waters in boats propelled by oars. He gave

names to numbers as far as one hundred, was familiar with the principles of decimals, and took the moon for his guide in dividing the year into months.

A Supreme Being was worshipped in Bactria, the Great Unseen, the Creator and Governor of the world. In the reference to him of controversies that were difficult to settle, we trace the origin of the later trial by ordeal. Even some of our commonest stories are derived from fables current at least two thousand years B.C. in ancient Arya.

Aryan Migrations. Few in number at first, the Aryans long lived peaceably together. But as the population grew denser, great bodies, either compelled to search for food in other lands or moved by a thirst for exploration, broke away at different periods from the cradle of their race, in quest of new abodes.

The first to leave were the Celts, who, passing between the Caspian Sea and the Black, made their way westward into Europe, and, conquering an indigenous population of supposed Turanian origin, possessed themselves of its fairest lands.* Following them, but by a route north of the Caspian, and ever pushing them toward the west, came the Slavonian and Teutonic tribes—the former, the ancestors of the Russians and Servians, Poles and Bohemians; the latter, of the Goths, Scandinavians, and German nations. Of the Aryans who thus migrated to the northwest, Max Müller says that they "have been the prominent actors in the great drama of history, and have carried to their fullest growth all the elements of active

*In common with the Celts, the North American Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, and other ancient nations, cherished a tradition that they had supplanted an original population-the children of the soil-of low intellectual powers, feeders on roots, hole-dwellers, serpent-eaters.

ARYAN MIGRATIONS.

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life with which our nature is endowed. They have perfected society and morals. They have become, after struggles with Semitic and Turanian races, the rulers of history; and it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by the chains of civilization, commerce, and religion."

After the last emigration of Aryans to the west, the parent community extended its settlements southward into the Tableland of Iran (e'rahn) (modern Persia, Afghanistan, and Beloochistan; see Map), and finally, in consequence of a religious difference, separated into two great branches. One remained on the Iranian plateau, and was ultimately known in history as the Medes and Persians. The other made its way through

the mountain-passes, crossed the upper Indus (at some uncertain date, between 2000 and 1400 B.C.), and in time effected the conquest of the rich peninsula of Hindostan. The invaders were the "fair-complexioned" Indo-Aryans, who spoke the polished Sanscrit, and among whom sprung up the institution of caste and many gross superstitions.

Aryan Languages. Similarity in the words and grammatical structure of their languages proves that the Hindoos, the Persians, the Greeks and Romans, the Celtic races, the Slavonian and Teutonic nations,-all had a common origin; that the frozen Icelander and Indian fire-worshipper, the outcast Gypsy and the plaided Highlander, the English master and his Cooley servant, are brothers of the same stock. Their tongues have been derived from the same parent—a language full of poetic grandeur, older than Greek or Sanscrit, and containing the germs of both-a language which has perished.

Spoken as we have seen from India to the west of Europe, these tongues have been called INDO-EUROPEAN. They embrace the dialects of India and Persia; the Welsh, and the Celtic of Scotland and Ireland; the Latin and its derivatives, the Romance languages, viz., Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Provençal, and Wallachian; Greek; Russian, Polish, and Bohemian; English, German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish (see Linguistic Map of Europe and Chart, preceding the title-page). The relationship existing among these tongues of the Indo-European race—preëminently the race of progressive civilization-has been established by the study of their several grammars.

THE SEMITES.

The Semitic Languages, in like manner, may all be traced 'to a common source. To this group belong the Syriac, the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Ethiopic, the ancient Phœnician, and the Carthaginian; while the cuneiform inscriptions of Bab

SEMITES AND TURANIANS.

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ylonia and Assyria are the written characters of a Semitic tongue common to those countries. (See Chart, p. 85.)

Philology has not followed the Semites to a home as limited as that of the Aryans; though tradition points to Armenia as their early domicile. It declares, however, the Semitic and the Aryan to be distinct families of speech, which, while both may be branches from a common parent stem, could not have been derived one from the other.

THE TURANIANS.

Turanian Dialects.-Here there is slighter evidence of relationship. The Turanian languages, though they seem to be members of the same original family, differ widely; for those who spoke them were nomads, wanderers over the globe, whose customs, laws, and dialects were modified with every change of habitation and condition. To this sporadic group belong the Mongolian tongues, the Turkish, Finnic, and Hungarian, together with certain Polynesian dialects; but the Chinese, Japanese, Australian, North American Indian, South African, and many others of the nine hundred languages spoken on the earth, bear hardly enough resemblance to these to be classed in the same family.

SYSTEMS OF WRITING.

Language is either spoken or written. Spoken language we find to have been used as a medium of communication between men in the earliest periods to which history carries us back. It is the expression of reason, and as such constitutes a line of demarcation between man and the lower animals. Without it, indeed, the brute can, to a certain extent, make known his emotions and desires. The house-dog, by the distinctive character of his bark, welcomes his master or threatens the intrusive stranger. The hen warns her chicks of danger by one set of signals, and calls them to feed by another.

The ant, discovering an inviting grain too heavy for itself alone, bears the intelligence to its fellows and promptly returns with aid. But such limited means of communication fall infinitely short of the perfect system which is exclusively man's birthright-which uses articulate sounds to represent ideas, and combines them so as to express every shade of thought.

Written Language.-Spoken Language lives only for the moment; words uttered to-day die and are forgotten to-morrow. To give permanency to his passing thoughts, when advancing civilization showed such permanency to be desirable, man devised Writing, the art of representing ideas by visible characters. Written Language is the vehicle of literaturethe material in which the thinker embodies his conceptions for future generations, just as the sculptor gives permanent forms to his ideals in marble, or the painter on the glowing

canvas.

Writing is either Ideographic or Phonetic. The Ideographic System represents material objects and abstract notions directly, by pictures or symbols. The Phonetic System uses certain characters to express the articulate sounds by which such objects or notions are denoted, and thus indirectly, through the two media of sounds and characters, indicates the objects or notions themselves.

IDEOGRAPHIC WRITING.-The earliest mode of conveying ideas of visible objects was by pictorial imitations. We have examples of it in the original hieroglyphics of Egypt and China, and the cuneiform letters borrowed from their Turanian inventors by the Assyrians and Persians. It was also practised by the Aztecs or ancient Mexicans, and the inhabitants of Central America. Thought-painting, as it may be called, has this advantage, that to a certain extent it is understood as well by the illiterate classes at home as by foreign nations speaking different tongues.

Hieroglyphics, at first purely pictorial, at length became