Volume 2

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: of something preternatural and portentous, and impressed the multitude with a notion that they were possessed by demons. Of this latter description were the wizards of the old Finnish races, whose successors, the sorcerers and witches of Lappland, sell wind to English mariners. Such were the angekoks of the Esquimaux, discovered by the missionaries to Greenland; and such are the shamans of all the eastern and northern countries of Asia, whither neither Buddhism nor Islam have yet penetrated. By such traits as these, which display more fully and certainly than external manners and the modes of sustaining life the culture or rudeness of the mind, the barbaric tribes, dispersed over all the extreme parts of the ancient continent, are distinguished from the cultivated nations of Upper Asia, and from the European races allied to them in language and descent. Paragraph 5.?Of the different Groupes of Nations comprehended among the Allophylian Races. The ethnology of the Allophylian races is involved in greater obscurity than that of the tribes which belong to the Indo-European family. The sources of information respecting them are more scanty and difficult of access, and in many instances remain yet unexplored. We have, however, sufficient knowledge to convince us that many of these nations are referrible to particular stems, the branches of which are spread through remote regions. An attentive research has often discovered traces of connexion between tribes of people who must have been, from very ancient times, separated from each other by great distances of space; and these traces are sometimes so definite, as to leave no doubt that they owe their existence to affinity and sameness of origin. Such phenomena have been recognised among rude nations, scattered through immense spac...

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: of something preternatural and portentous, and impressed the multitude with a notion that they were possessed by demons. Of this latter description were the wizards of the old Finnish races, whose successors, the sorcerers and witches of Lappland, sell wind to English mariners. Such were the angekoks of the Esquimaux, discovered by the missionaries to Greenland; and such are the shamans of all the eastern and northern countries of Asia, whither neither Buddhism nor Islam have yet penetrated. By such traits as these, which display more fully and certainly than external manners and the modes of sustaining life the culture or rudeness of the mind, the barbaric tribes, dispersed over all the extreme parts of the ancient continent, are distinguished from the cultivated nations of Upper Asia, and from the European races allied to them in language and descent. Paragraph 5.?Of the different Groupes of Nations comprehended among the Allophylian Races. The ethnology of the Allophylian races is involved in greater obscurity than that of the tribes which belong to the Indo-European family. The sources of information respecting them are more scanty and difficult of access, and in many instances remain yet unexplored. We have, however, sufficient knowledge to convince us that many of these nations are referrible to particular stems, the branches of which are spread through remote regions. An attentive research has often discovered traces of connexion between tribes of people who must have been, from very ancient times, separated from each other by great distances of space; and these traces are sometimes so definite, as to leave no doubt that they owe their existence to affinity and sameness of origin. Such phenomena have been recognised among rude nations, scattered through immense spac...