Granthan, which preserves the essential forms of the oldest Indian. Of this the Malayalam of Central India is nearly a copy, and the cursive forms of Pali are very similar.

Further India. These Pali letters penetrated Farther India, flowed beyond Burmah to Anam, and gave rise to all the alphabets of Laos, Xieng Khrun, and Cambodia, and to the Siamese, and to those of the islands of Celebes, Makassar, Sumatra, and others.

Later Northern Indian.- In Northern India the Magadha letters received a different modification by addition of lines, by which they were enclosed or erected. Considerable differences have arisen between the letters in different states of Northern India, yet all are closely related, and all are from the Magadha without great change of essential forms. Because these northern tribes are most Sanskritic, credence has been given to the claim that the Deva Nagari alphabet is the oldest in India. In truth it is the alphabet which has received more modification than any other northern type, and must rank among the very newest of its style. The letters which in Bengal are used for writing Sanskrit are of an older style than the Deva Nagari, which in this country are supposed to be the distinctive Sanskrit alphabet.

Thibetian. In the seventh and eighth centuries Buddhism, which was soon after destroyed in India, crossed the Himalayas, and was embraced in Thibet and Mongolia. It gave to Thibet the Indian letters of the seventh century, and to these Thibet owes its literature. Another Mongolian alphabet, called "Pa Sse Pa," is only the Sanskritic Thibetian made square and heavy, although tradition says it was invented in 1260 A.D.

Japanese. But the spread of letters and of Buddhism did not cease till Japan, in the eighth century, adopted letters whose foundation was the Indian alphabet.

Summary. We close our survey at the shores of the Pacific Ocean. We have seen that the alphabet was the blossoming of the primeval civilization of Egypt. Incapable of transportation, it seemed to wither, but the withering was

the necessary ripening of the seed, to fit it for a life anywhere throughout the world. Carried to Canaan it grew and blos somed anew, and from its perennial flowers gave out to every wind its floating seeds, which, borne to east and west, and north and south, have reached the utmost coasts, and, encircling the globe, have filled it with their fruit.

Human pride must humble itself before this evidence of man's imbecile dependence. Civilization and literature blush at their own youthfulness. The mazes of history grow more wonderful as they are seen to mingle with the mysteries of divine providence. Events which seemed to be local trifles have proved to be tidal waves, which, on three continents, left the tokens of the passing of a great era. The sun can scarcely compass, with his noon-day rays, the scope of the glory of that sixth century before Christ. Syrian captives wept by the rivers of Babylon, but Eastern Asia smiled as glad eyes found in the plucked flower of Canaan transplanted on the Euphrates, something more precious than would have been music from the silent harps on the willows. A new life is felt in the land of Shinar, and sends its impulses to the west. It seems to fall in the assault of war on Greece, but utmost Europe and the islands of the sea are by it covered with the glory of a new civilization.

And we, surrounded with our treasures and our joys, must say, with letters we have everything. Without the one alphabet there had been nothing.

ARTICLE VII.

REMARKS ON J. G. MUELLER'S DIE SEMITEN.

BY PROF. C. H. TOY, GREENVILLE, South Carolina.

THE apparently anomalous position of the Canaanites speaking a language of the group called Shemitic, yet belonging, according to the Table in Gen. x., to the Hamitic family has long furnished a problem to scholars. Various solutions have been offered. Accepting the threefold division of Gen. x. as, in general, founded on real ethnographic differences, some have supposed that the Canaanites were Shemites, others that they adopted the language of the Hebrews, and others still that the Hebrews adopted their language. In any case the essential identity of the Phoenician, Canaanitish, Hebrew, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syrian, and Assyrian tongues excites surprise and calls for explanation. Dr. Müller, of Basle, has offered an explanation in his recent work "Die Semiten," which is an elaboration of views presented by him some years ago in his Article "Canaaniter," in Herzog's "Real-Encyclopädie." He holds that the name "Shemite" means nothing but Hamitised Japhethite, and that what are called Shemitic languages are simply Hamitic languages spoken by Japhetic or Indo-European peoples. He supposes that in the period of national migrations (about B.c. 3000-2000) while a part of the Indo-Europeans remained in their native seats and retained their language, another part passed (in nomadic hordes) westward and northward into Hamitic lands, found there well-developed civilization and cultivated languages, which they adopted, and thus became externally Hamites, retaining, however, certain general religious conceptions which they had brought with them. The proof of this he finds in the ethnological, linguistic, and religious statements of the Hebrew Scriptures (especially Gen. x.), in

other ancient writings (Greek, Roman, Phenician, Egyptian), and in the linguistic relations themselves.

Professor Müller's argument is clear and simple, and he has brought together many interesting facts, and made some excellent remarks. Thus, he points out the confusion which exists in the use of the term "Shemitic," showing that some of the best scholars of modern times (as Lassen, Hitzig, Rénan) have employed it sometimes in a linguistic sense, as including all the peoples who spoke this class of languages, and sometimes in an ethnological sense, as including the peoples who are derived from Shem in the Table of Nations in Genesis. His defence of the historical trustworthiness of this Table, proof that its principle of division is an ethnographical one, and demonstration that the Canaanites did not take their language from the Hebrews, are in the main good. We think, however, that he has failed to establish his main proposition. Relying chiefly on resemblances in geographical names, he assumes, as thereby proved, the extraordinary linguistic fact that peoples speaking one family of languages, by adopting a second, have produced a third, differing very greatly in form and matter from both the others. For so remarkable a fact, we require more conclusive proof than Professor Müller has given.

The course of his argument is briefly this: He first locates the Hamitic peoples of the Table in Genesis, Cush in Southwestern Asia (Babylonians) and Africa (Ethiopians), Mizraim in Egypt, Canaan on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and Put on its southern shore, and then endeavors to show that these all spoke languages of the class now called Shemitic. He then undertakes to trace all the Shemites of the Table to Indo-European lands: Elam to Persia, Asshur to Kurdistan, Arpakshad to Chaldea, Lud to Asia Minor, Aram to Armenia, and so concludes that they originally spoke Indo-European languages. Hence it follows that Shemites are simply Japhethites that have adopted Hamitic languages.

that

There are grave objections to both his premises the languages of the Hamites were simply Shemitic, and that

the homes of the Shemites were Indo-European, which we propose briefly to state.

First, however, one or two prima facie difficulties in the way of this theory may be mentioned.

Professor Müller relies greatly (and properly) on the trustworthiness of the Hebrew national consciousness to establish their ethnological diversity from the Canaanites. The record of the Table, he says, cannot be referred to national hatred, or to any other cause but the national memory of a fact. If this be so, how is it to be explained that the national consciousness preserved no trace of the original identity of the Hebrews and Japhethites? Not from lapse of time, for, according to Dr. Müller, the migrations of the Indo-European bodies occurred not long before Abraham's time, and were not old enough to grow dim.1 Certainly, if we are to appeal to national memory, the Hebrews were as distinct in race from Japheth as from Ham.

There is another and still greater difficulty in the way of this theory. It is strange that different Indo-European tribes should have so utterly given up their speech as to preserve no trace of it in form and flexion, and scarcely a distinguishable resemblance in matter and roots, while at the same time they elaborated a set of dialects which point unmistakably to one parent tongue. No such occurrence can be found in historical times. Dr. Müller adduces as illustrations the Jews, the Sclaves, and the Germans. But in all these cases the circumstances were different. The Jews adopted an Aramaic dialect very like their own language, after they had been a long time exiles in an Aramaic land, and when they were a small community in a region which was everywhere adopting the dialect. Afterwards they spoke

1 The Table in Gen. x. is by many referred to Samuel; and Knobel (Völkertafel d. Gen. Einl.) sees no difficulty in supposing that its details may have been known to the East and to the Hebrews as early as B.C. 1100-1000. So far as the knowledge is concerned, Moses may have had it; but the Table was probably written in Canaan. Portions of it (vss. 9, 19, 21-32) seem to be older than Moses; and, in its present form, it may be the work of a contemporary of Joshua after the conquest, B.C. 1400.