equally unimportant. The most unhistoric people on
earth, they cared more for the minutiae of grammar, or the subtilties of
metaphysics, than for the whole of their past. The only date which has
emerged from this vague antiquity is that of Chandragupta, a contemporary
of Alexander, and called by the Greek historians Sandracottus. He became
king B.C. 315, and as, at his accession, Buddha had been dead (by Hindoo
statement) one hundred and sixty-two years, Buddha may have died B.C. 477.
We can thus import a single date from Greek history into that of India.
This is the whole.

But all at once light dawns on us from an unexpected quarter. While we can
learn nothing concerning the history of India from its literature, and
nothing from its inscriptions or carved temples, _language_, comes to our
aid. The fugitive and airy sounds, which seem so fleeting and so
changeable, prove to be more durable monuments than brass or granite. The
study of the Sanskrit language has told us a long story concerning the
origin of the Hindoos. It has rectified the ethnology of Blumenbach, has
taught us who were the ancestors of the nations of Europe, and has given
us the information that one great family, the Indo-European, has done most
of the work of the world. It shows us that this family consists of seven
races,--the Hindoos, the Persians, the^ Greeks, the Romans, who all
emigrated to the south from the original ancestral home; and the Kelts,
the Teutons, and Slavi, who entered Europe on the northern side of the
Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. This has been accomplished by the new
science of Comparative Philology. A comparison of languages has made it
too plain to be questioned, that these seven races were originally one;
that they must have emigrated from a region of Central Asia, at the east
of the Caspian, and northwest of India; that they were originally a
pastoral race, and gradually changed their habits as they descended from
those great plains into the valleys of the Indus and the Euphrates. In
these seven linguistic families the roots of the most common names are the
same; the grammatical constructions are also the same; so that no scholar,
who has attended to the subject, can doubt that the seven languages are
all daughters of one common mother-tongue.

Pursuing the subject still further, it has been found possible to
conjecture with no little confidence what was the condition of family life
in this great race of Central Asia, befor