Researches Into The Physical History Of Mankind (Volume 1) - neues Buch

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: well be remarked, that many investigations which at first had been thought likely to furnish arguments against the truth and authority of the Sacred Records, have been found ultimately to confirm and elucidate them. From all these considerations it appears better to proceed in the inquiry to which the following pages are devoted with as much freedom as if the testimony of the Sacred Scripture were altogether indifferent as to its decision. Section IV.?Inadequacy of historical Sources of Information. Nor can any sufficient and conclusive evidence be obtained in these inquiries from researches merely historical. M. Baillie, Sir William Jones, and other writers on the ancient history of the East have displayed a remarkable connexion between the traditions of the most celebrated nations of antiquity, whose descent from a common ancestry they have hence inferred. Perhaps this conclusion may be allowed to have been established with respect to the Indians, the Greeks, the Persians, and the Teutonic nations: in all these instances, indeed, affinity of languages renders the kindred origin of the respective nations extremely probable. On historical grounds we might add to the preceding nations those of the Semitic family, the Hebrews, Syrians, Arabs, who though they differ essentially in language from the Indo-European race, have preserved similar histories or traditions. If we join to all these some African nations, the Egyptians, Abyssinians, Berbers, or Libyans, which is all that the most sanguine antiquarian or philologist could pretend to claim, we still fall short of anything like proof that all mankind derived their origin from a single stock. How are we to bring within the pale the African Negroes, with their multitudinous jargons; the Hottentots; the Australians; the Papuas, ...