considerable service, by attracting their attention to the aboriginal antiquities of these Islands. Who can resist the contagion of Celtic enthusiasm, when he appeals to the evidence of so many lithographic prints, which occupy nearly half the volume? they are well executed, and certainly most appropriate to the representation of such extraordinary A. Mr. Higgins boasts of the rapidity with which he has executed his task. It would have been better if he had taken more time he might have avoided numerous mistakes, a few of which our duty compels us to point out. 1. He condemns "the carelessness with which the Greeks have rendered the words and letters of one language into another," especially the change of a into o. Now if he has ever heard the languages of which he writes pronounced, he must know the extreme difficulty, in general, of making out any distinct sound exactly corresponding to our vowels, even with the greatest care; and his residence in Yorkshire might have taught him, that in the dialects of our own language, a and o pass into one another; and though the northcountryman preserves the sound of a in such words as hall and fall, yet the common pronunciation almost confounds it with o. On the other hand, he frequently turns the o into a, as in mair, sair, &c. Thus, too, the aleph of the Hebrews is oleph in Syriac, and both sounds are represented under the same character by the Masoretic points. 66 2. He suggests a mode of learning the art of calculation, which might have been resorted to by the first race of men, and thence concludes not only that it must have been employed, but that it actually was. If this is a specimen of the reasoning by which he boasts of having proved that the Sabbath was not instituted till the time of Moses, his friends, the priests, have no occasion to argue that matter with him. In the first place, it is not true, as he asserts, that the septenary cycle may be discovered in every nation that has learned the art of arithmetic. "The week of seven days," says Humboldt, was unknown in America, as well as in part of Central Asia;" (this, it will be seen by-and-by, is touching him in a tender part;)"the least division of time amongst the Muyscas was three days." But in the next place, his theory is truly, as he calls it himself, an aerial castle" without a foundation; for it is not true that the moon performs her revolution in 28 days; and, therefore the septenary cycle could not have been obtained by quartering that period; she takes more than 29 days. Is it possible that the Misohierist could have been ignorant of this? However, he could not be ignorant that there are 365 days in the year; and yet he goes on to say, that if these first men collected calculi, i. e. pebbles, and deposited one for every day, they would find there were 360 days in a period of the sun's revolution. How would they find that? Accurate observation would teach them otherwise; and the inaccurate observation which might certainly be expected from men who counted with pebbles, might as well bring them to 359, or 361, or 364, which, indeed, * P. 6. † P. 8. Researches, vol. ii. p. 110. upon the hypothesis of their having discovered months of 28 days long before, is the number on which they would naturally fix, in order that the lunar and solar periods might coincide. But in the next page he forgets all about the first discovery of the septenary cycle, and is so busy with his division of the circle and the solar year, that he loses sight entirely of the many hundred years, which he had before supposed to elapse between that discovery and the invention of geometry; for, says he "about the time this was going on, (the division of the circle into 360 degrees,) they would find that the moon made 13 lunations in a year (that is 360 days), of 28 days each, instead of 12 only of 30.* They would be very clever indeed, if they could find 13 times 28 in 360. To make some amends for demolishing this baseless fabric of a theory, we beg leave to suggest to Mr. Higgins, (and we doubt not that he will thank us for the hint,) that three has been a mystical number ever since the creation; that 360 is a multiple of 3; that 9 is the square of 3; and that 90 is the simplest division of the circle. 3. His argument about the Druids' letters is singularly clumsy and inconclusive; he wants to prove that the Druids used the Greek letters brought by Cadmus to Greece before their increase the Pelasgic letters; and Cæsar is his authority: Cæsar says, they used Greek letters. What Greek did Cæsar mean? Was he an antiquary-a book-worm-an examiner of Alphabets-an adorer of the Celts-a Higgins? No; he was conversant only in polite literature, and the best-bred gentleman, as well as the greatest general, of his age. What Greek, then, could he mean, but the Greek of his own day-the Greek then in fashion-the 24 letter Greek-the Greek which, according to the Misohierist himself, had in the space of three or four hundred years changed its old Phoenician form very much. It is a pity there should not be one scrap of their prodigious learning remaining, to prove, at least, the shape of their letters; but perhaps those learned men had no more care for letters than their public business required. Assuming, however, that these letters were 17 in number, he proceeds to argue thus for the antiquity of the Celts. "It is probable," he says, "that the nation amongst whom the fewest and most simple letters are found, will be the oldest :"+ therefore, à fortiori, that nation will be the oldest which has none; therefore the Chicasaws and Cherokees, the Hottentots and Esquimaux, are the ne plus ultra of antiquity. But why does he keep such a stir about an alphabet of 17 letters, in the face of Mr. Innes's evidence that the genuine Irish had 18, and when his own specimen of a Druidical alphabet, the Bethluisnion, contains 22? But Rudbeck the Swede maintains, that at the siege of Troy the Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, and the Greek only 16. Mr. Higgins, therefore, must be of opinion, that the Greek is the older of the two; and upon this principle the Chinese must have greatly mistaken their antiquity: theirs must be quite a mushroom alphabet, a creature of yesterday; for its letters, * P. 10. P. 23. † P. 12. according to Père Le Compte, amount to 80,000. The truth is, that young alphabets are limited to 16 or 17; as they grow old they increase in stature; the Bardic, for instance, has increased to 36 and 40. The Egyptian alphabet of phonetic signs contains 120; and it is a sound argument of the antiquity of the language used by Moses, that it had 22 letters. However, it is to be observed, that since the Samaritan alphabet was not the same as the Phoenician, and, though sprung from the same stock, not used by the same people, the Jews may have had their 22 letters at the same time when the Phoenicians had only 16 or 17; and, therefore, it is a false conclusion of Mr. Higgins, that there must have been a migration of the latter before they were expelled by Joshua. But if there was, the date of their leaving Phoenicia will not be the date of their arrival in Britain, and so cannot prove their antiquity in these Islands; for while the old settlers were improving their alphabet, the young swarms were traversing Europe: this is his own theory. But an Irish antiquary, in the "Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis," will not allow even half the date of Joshua to the Punic connexion; he says the first colonization of Ireland by the Celtic aborigines (not Phoenician) was between 640 and 700 before Christ, and the Punic traders first arrived 200 years afterwards. tion of the Apple, are certainly not English; the Pomegranate, the Mulberry, the Cedar and the Pine. Mr. Davies, in his " Celtic Researches," has noticed a Druidical alphabet, in which "each of the letters received its name from some tree or plant of a certain species, regarded as being in some view or other descriptive of its power; and these names are still retained." The reverse of this process is rather more probable; trees obtained their names from letters, as a method of distinction at the dawn of science, and when certain virtues belonging to them were either discovered or imagined, the notion of some mysterious power was communicated to the letters themselves. But either of these suppositions is equally fatal to the hypothesis of Mr. Higgins, to which it is time that we should introduce the reader. According to his ingenious suggestion, the first mute alphabet consisted of leaves; leaves represented trees, and trees represented letters; and these symbols of a symbol were strung together to form words. Thus, if we would spell Godfrey, we must go out into the woods and gather a leaf of the Ivy (G), of the Spindle (O), of the Oak (D), of the Alder (F), of the Elder (R), of the Aspen (E), and of the Yew (Y);*-a very healthy mode of learning to spell, no doubt, and much to be preferred to confinement in a school-room, and sad meditations upon A, B, C; but very inconvenient for the purpose of communicating knowledge. Has Mr. Higgins yet to learn that leaves soon shrivel, and dry up, and crumble to pieces, and therefore cannot be kept for filing, like newspapers? or if they were to be always fresh, a botanical garden would be required near every student's house, and a considerable stock, too, of preliminary knowledge; for we much suspect that there are many well-bred ladies and gentlemen of the present day, who would be sadly puzzled by the Quicken-tree, and must go to school again to distinguish the Spindle from the Birch. However, he fortifies himself in his opinion by an authority from Virgil.t He imagines that the Sibyll used this alphabet at the Cuman cave; but here again he is wrong, the Sibyll wrote her answers on the leaves (in foliis descripsit), and the fear of Eneas was not only the disturbance of the leaves, but lest they should be entirely car Our author's speculation upon the origin of the Hiberno-Celtic alphabet is still more extraordinary; he asserts that "the Irish, Greek, Hebrew and Samaritan alphabets have all been called after English trees, or the English trees after them." Let us see how this is made out: Elm is certainly like Ailm, but not at all like Alpha or Aleph; Yew has a sort of resemblance to Jod, and Birch begins with the same letter as Beth and Beta; but none of the rest have even the similarity of alliteration; they are as different sounds as can be imagined: for instance, what has Ivy to do with Gimel, Gamma, or Goot? what has Oak to do with Daleth, Delta, or Duir? However, the Misohierist is intrepid, and finds out a "striking" likeness between Vine and Muin, Mu and Mem. We were not aware that the Vine was an English tree, and the famous Celtic bard, Taliesin, was so ignorant, as to substitute for it the Raspberry-tree. Perhaps the "many thou-ried away by the violence of the wind (ne sand years" which Mr. Higgins supposes to have elapsed since the arrival of his Celts, may have affected an alteration in the climate. Still it may be thought somewhat remarkable, that thirteen of the Irish letters should be names of trees; but it will be found, upon inquiry, that it was a common practice to affix arbitrary and cabalistic meanings to names of letters, which had other significations of their own. Beyer, indeed, falling into the same error, affirms that each of the Chaldean or Hebrew letters derives its name from some tree or shrub; but then they are all totally different from those assigned to them by Mr. Hig. gins. Beth is not the Birch, but the Thorn; Daleth is not the Oak, but the Vine; Vau is not the Alder, but the Palm; Jod is not the Yew, but the Ivy: the others, with the excep↑ P. 24. * P. 262, volent rapidis ludibria ventis);§ and it was not the letters which the prophetess cared not to re-arrange, but the lines (carmina).|| But all this is mere trifling. Of the origin of alphabets there can be little doubt: the first records of events were pictures, like those of Mexico; with which, by the way, Mr. Higgins seems to have a very limited acquaintance. A man and his wife in a boat, and a bird with a branch in its mouth, were memorials of the deluge. But when actions and qualities were to be expressed, the difficulty was greater, and the method more circuitous. Pictures of common objects lent their initial sounds to form successively an unrepresentable word, and the ear was called in to aid the eye; the figures † P. 29. Lib. iii. verse 446. § Lib. vi. verse 76. Lib. iii. verse 452. * P. 26. 34 formative of a single word were connected join the following droll explanation of the Heunder a common bond, and hence those "literæbrew alphabet from Eusebius.* The first five the multitude of its books: the three next-By ignorabiles" of Apuleius, which he remarked letters mean, The Erudition of a house is in in certain books, "partim figuris animalium it the living lives: the two next-It is a good concepti sermonis compendiosa verba suggethe three next-That out of them is everlastrentes, partim nodosis, et in modum rota tor- beginning: the two next-Learn, however: tuosis, capreolatimque condensis apicibus." Perhaps we may recognise in the latter part of ing help: the three next-The source and mouth of righteousness: the four lastthis description, the divining sprigs but not the leaves of the Druids. If the Chaldmans, κεφαλῆς καὶ ὁδόντων σημεῖα—which we leave to before their alphabet was regularly formed, had better scholars to explain as they can. wished to record that Mr. Higgins wrote a book, the pictures of a Yorkshireman and a book might have sufficed; but if they were such villanous critics as to add, that it was a bad one, they would have expressed the word bad, by a house, an ox, and a gate, Beth being a house, Aleph an ox, and Daleth a door or gate. Thus in the Egyptian alphabet, a lion represented the sound of L, because labo was a lion, and a hand represented T, because tot was a hand. Now it is evident that the varieties of trees are too remote from the necessities of life, and bear too much resemblance to one another, to be available in this respect. If any one doubts this, let him only look at old Gerarde, or any of our ancient herbalists, and judge whether it is an easy thing to recognise a tree from its portrait, even in an age so little And for the nature of removed from our own. the emblems, we would refer him to Plutarch,t who says that Alpha was the first letter, because in Phoenician it meant a cow, which is the first necessary of life. We do not deny that the leaves arranged according to Mr. Higgins's plan may have formed a tolerable cypher for secret correspondence, and this in point of fact is the real history of the famous Bethluisnion alphabet. "It owes its origin," says Mr. Beauford, to the monks of the middle ages, who composed it from the Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic alphabets, as an Abraxas, or secret character, wherein to write their charms and incantations. Having lost the form of their Bobeloth and Bethluisnion, they applied their names to the Abicetoria, which they put in the order of those ancient characters, to give them the greater appearance of antiquity; and hearing from some of their poems and chronicles that the ancient Irish wrote upon wood and the bark of trees, they imagined their letters bore the name of trees; in consequence of which they have interpreted the names of the Bethluisnion to signify so many trees, though they have no such signification in any language upon earth." After this it is unnecessary to say more; but * Metam. 1. 2. + Symp. p. 1047, vol, vi. § Ibid. p. 271. 4. With respect to pronunciation, our author falls into a most comical blunder,t which, if he had not dealt so learnedly in alphabets, might almost justify a suspicion, that he does not know much of his own: he derives Cadiz from and the instances he gives are os, oves, agros, Gafis, by Digamma changing the F into D, avernum, &c. Now it is well known that, as in the instances he cites, the Digamma F bas retained, in Latin derivatives from the Greek, some affinity to the original sound of that sinbut what has it to do with D? or who ever gular letter which the Greeks somehow lost: imagined before that labials and dentals are interchangeable?-at least in the Celtic languages, it is quite impossible. It is difficult even to conjecture the cause of this strange confusion, unless indeed it be, what we strongly suspect, that Digamma begins with D, and therefore oves should be pronounced odes, and vinum, dinum. Again, Cadiz being still the subject of his speculation, he gravely announces that C was formerly pronounced K: does he mean to say that it is pronounced otherwise now? However, having settled these matters to his satisfaction, he proceeds to insinuate a connexion between Cadiz and Gabis: but Mr. Roberts thinks the latter too far to the East for the Cimmerii: upon which he slily remarks that it is curious. have dismissed it so perfunctorily, if he had known that Gabee, which is probably the Gabas of Arrian, and the Gabaza of Curtius, is placed by D'Anville exactly in the situation assigned by himself to Samarcand, about the site of Kogend. One more specimen of his skill in pronunciation will suffice: the pronoun ye, is it a monosyllable or a dissyllable? vulgar here will decide for the monosyllable; far otherwise the better instructed Mr. Higgins: y-o-u should say y-e. This, at least, is exactly the mode in which he would have those letters pronounced in the word which Usher's correspondent used to express to English ears the sound given by the Samaritans to yehueh, y-e-hu-eh. § He would not The 5. We have next some observations to make upon his geography. He pitches on latitude 45°, and the longitude of Samarcand for the spot where the Ark rested after the deluge, somewhere among the mountains of Bactriana.fi And in another part he says, that the Celts, having been settled from the first in that country, are the people described by the Persian He believes, poets as residing in Samarcand. therefore, that Samarcand is in latitude 45°. Giving him, however, the full benefit of the + P. 101. Walter's Gram Præp. Evan. 1. 10, p. 474. mar. $ P. 25. ¶ P. 267. dreary silence-only a few prickly shrubs here and there, and the soil encrusted with salt: 250 miles more, south of the Moughodjar hills, brought him to the Jaxartes, through a level uniform country apparently burnt up; no river or rivulet all the way, nor water, except salt lakes; a wide-spreading desert of moving sands. Only on the line of the Jaxartes was there a plain twelve or fourteeen miles wide, tolerably covered with tall reeds and grass. This is the favourite latitude of 45°, and here in November the thermometer was at 94°. Sixty miles south of the Jaxartes, he came to jungles, reeds, swamps, splashes of water, and hillocks of sand. Then seventy or eighty miles across the desert of Kizilcoum without water, to a mountainous country. Was it on these mountains the Ark rested? Beyond them, there remained twenty miles more of sand, and it was not till he had nearly reached the fortieth parallel, about sixty or seventy miles from Bokhara, that the scene changed from a barren desert to a well-cultivated country. Lastly, another Russian, Captain Mouraview, travelled from the eastern coast of the Caspian to Khiva on the Oxus over a desert, if possible, more destitute of water and vegetation; the very image of desolation: and the Oasis of Khiva is not more than 100 miles square. utmost limits within which he confines the wanderings of the Gomerians, that is to say, the latitudes 40° and 50°, we affirm that Samarcand is not within those limits. Ulugh Beigh, the great astronomer of Samarcand in the middle of the fifteenth century, fixes its latitude at 39° 37'. Neither is there any probability that it was the first capital built after the flood, as he imagines.* The memoirs of the Emperor Baber, written by himself in the language of Turkestan in Bactriana, more than 300 years ago, directly contradict this notion. They state that it was founded by Sekander, that is, Alexander; and that no great monarch before Taimur Beg (Tamerlane) ever made it the seat of his government. He directed its wall to be paced round the rampart, and found the circumference to be about five miles; no great area for the first capital of the world. But now, since he has determined that we are to look for the earliest population after the flood, and the source of languages, arts, and sciences, between the fortieth and fiftieth parallels, east of the Caspian sea, let us proceed to inquire what sort of a country it is, this nursery of mankind, this thickly peopled hive, which sent out swarm after swarm to carry its customs and language even to the ends of the earth. He himself is of course enchanted with it, and speaks with rapture of the delicious clinate from 45° to 50°. He supposes that the whole must be a continued sheepwalk, and quotes with approbation the Abbé Pezron, who speaks of its richness and fertility; nay, so deeply is he smitten with his day dreams of this paradise, that he hints an intention to seek enjoyment there himself. However, if he will take the advice of a friend, he will pause till he has heard the witnesses on the other side. Cluverius describes it thus: "It is a region for the most part uncultivated, melancholy, horrid, and desert. Quintus Curtius says, that a great part is covered with barren sand, a region hideous from drought, and sustaining neither man nor corn. Sogdiana (which is to the north of Bactriana but within the fiftieth parallel, and assigned by Ptolemy to the Gomeri) is for the most part a desert through almost 80 stadia in breadth, full of vast solitudes. The whole Bactrian force assembled to resist the invasion of Alexander, though every man in those hordes is a soldier, amounted to no more than 30,000 men." Marco Polo, speaking of the desert of Lopt between 40° and 50°, says, travellers must provide victuals for a month to cross it only; for to go through it lengthways would require a year's time. The Emperor Baber describes Ferghâna, which has Kashgar on the east and Samarcand on the west, and therefore lies in the same latitude, as the extreme boundary of the habitable world. If we come to more recent times, in 1820 a Russian slave observed to Baron Mey-tains, between these latitudes, of no conseendorff, that it was a country which God must have created in his wrath; and we have the baron's own account of his journey from Orenbourg to Bokhara, to justify the slave. If we follow his progress southward from latitude 50°, we shall find the first 150 miles a steppe characterized by aridity, uniformity, and a + P. 56 * P. 78. + Harris's Voyages and Travels. The mountains mentioned by Baron Meyendorff must certainly be the Ararat of Mr. Higgins, for he makes his Gomerians first "take a direction north, then westwards nearly along the forty-fifth parallel of N.L."* Upon this hypothesis, the second day's march would bring them into the sea of Aral, the fourth into the Caspian, and by the end of another week they would wade through the Bosphorus: before their clothes were well dry they would next plunge into the Euxine, and being thus perfectly amphibious, we see no reason why the Atlantic should stop them. We suspect (to use his own style of reasoning) that they walked through to America. But he continues"One swarm arrived on the Euxine, and there settled, and gave it the name of the Cimmnerian Bosphorus." It? what-the Euxine or the settlement? neither, certainly. The strait was the Bosphorus. But let us follow the Gomerian march: "Along the line pointed out," he says, "they would pass the rivers about the middle of their courses. And seas there were none, and yet they would naturally keep inclining towards the southern sun." Now along latitude 45° we have shown that there are seas, and after doubling the Caspian, they would cross the Volga and the Dnieper near their mouths, and the Danube, to get into Greece. Again-there is "not a single chain of mountains of any consequence." Are the Rhotian Alps, the Carpathian and Hercynian moun quence? However, if he had been content to make the tide of population roll westward slowly and gradually, filling up in its progress all the choicest spots below the fiftieth parallel, which was not preoccupied by those who crossed the Mediterranean, it will be easy to understand, why traces of their course may be discovered throughout the whole extent as * P. 67. 36 signed to it. But his impatience to bring them Apropos of this word Chaldeans, how comes * P. 54-68. + Strabo, lib. i. p. 35. Of certainly has a nearer affinity to Cimbri, Cam * P. 98. † P. 100. See Bryant and Faber. |