66

"Yes," he said at length, you may inform him that my name is Hastings; that having once known some members of his family, on hearing his name I was curious to learn whether he was related to them, and that I shall be happy to see him at any time he has leisure to look in on me.

Jacob delivered the message, and next day Harry paid Mr. Hastings a visit. He found him, as his appearance betokened, a man of education and refinement, but his spirits appeared greatly depressed. He received Harry in a friendly way, and soon threw off the formal manners he had at first exhibited.

Harry, though naturally somewhat curious to know more about him, afraid of appearing inquisitive, did not venture to question him in the way he might otherwise have done.

"I fear, sir, you feel greatly the misfortune that has happened to us,' observed Harry. "It must have been a bitter disappointment indeed, when you had every reason to hope that you would, after we had retaken the ship, be able to proceed on your voyage to England."

My young friend, I am inured to misfortunes and disappointments," answered Mr. Hastings; "for years past I have been accustomed to them. I have been deprived of all I held dear in life. I had resolved long ago to return to Europe, and soon after the last war with France broke out I was on my way to England, when the ship in which I had taken my passage was captured by the French, and carried into an island in the Indian Ocean with which no English seaman was acquainted. Here I, with many others, was detained a prisoner. Some were liberated, every means being taken to prevent them from becoming acquainted with its position. I, unfortunately, was known to have ascertained it from some observation I had been seen taking, and I was therefore detained till the termination of the war. My health gave way, and I had given up all hopes of recovery, when I was taken to Batavia. Here I remained till long after the commencement of the present war, but was at length, however, allowed to sail for Bencoolen. I was again detained till the arrival of the Culloden, on board which I embarked, and she, as you know, was captured by a French frigate, and it seems to me that my prospect of reaching England is as far off as ever.

Harry endeavoured to cheer the unfortunate man, assuring him that he felt certain Captain Headland would, as soon as he could, come to look for the Culloden, and that he would without fail visit their island.

"I wish that I possessed your hopefulness, my young friend," answered Mr. Hastings, with a look of melancholy.

Harry, after this conversation with Mr. Hastings, often visited him, and was always received with a warm welcome. Instead of having suffered from the exposure to which he had been subject on the night of the wreck, he from that day appeared to gain strength, and was soon able to walk about and to visit different parts of the little island. Whatever he might have appeared to the passengers, he showed no haughtiness when, as was frequently the case, he

He never

failed when he met Jacob to have a talk with him, and make more inquiries about Texford and Hurlston.

By Harry's judicious arrangement good discipline was maintained among the community over whom he was called to govern, while he induced them to add to their stock of provisions by fishing and snaring birds, and by collecting eggs among the cliffs and shell-fish from the rocks. Fortunately a cask of hooks had been saved from the Dutch ship, as also a box of seeds. The islanders had cultivated a considerable plot of ground, which produced vegetables of all sorts, and this was now much increased by the new-comers.

Every evening, after their return from fishing and birdcatching, the men collected round the common fire, which had, by general consent, been lighted in the middle of the village. Here they employed themselves in cooking and eating the fish and birds they had caught. It soon became the general meeting-place of the whole community. At first the passengers had kept aloof, but by degrees they were induced to come and listen to the seamen's yarns, and to join in the conversation.

Harry and Mr. Hastings sometimes came near to the fire and joined in the conversation, though they more frequently sat at a little distance listening to what was going forward, and were often not a little amused by the remarks of their companions.

They were thus seated, when, the evening meal having been served out, the men as usual amused each other by narrating their adventures. Jack was appealed to to give his, for he was supposed to have gone. through more than the rest.

"Do you mean, mates, how I got away from the Malays, and was wrecked on this island ?" he asked. "No, no, Jacob has been telling us that you were wrecked long before that time, and had to live among savages ever so long," answered one of the men. "Can't you begin at the beginning? Let us hear all about yourself since you first came to sea."

Jack at first modestly apologised for talking about himself, but in a short time Harry heard him giving an account of his early days, when he first found himself on board a ship, knowing no more about the sea than did one of the sheep of the flock he had been wont to attend. He went on exciting the interest of his hearers till he arrived at that part of his history which he had already given to Harry.

"You see, mates, as I wanted to part from the skipper, and the skipper wanted to part from me, I was not sorry to ship on board another craft, little thinking what was about to happen to her. She had a strange name, had that craft, so strange that neither I nor any one else, I should think, could manage to speak it."

Jack then went on to describe how the little boy had been brought on board, how the mate seemed to have especial dislike to the child, and then how

the vessel was wrecked.

Mr. Hastings, who had before been lying down, sat up, and, bending forward, listened with the greatest attention to what Jack was saying.

"Was the name of the craft you sailed in the Bomanjee Horrmarjee ?" he suddenly exclaimed, in a tone of the deepest interest, rising and coming up to Jack.

"That was the name, sir," exclaimed Jack, "and if you are not the gentleman who brought the little

boy aboard, you are just like him, though to be sure, as a good many years have passed since then, that would make the difference."

"I am the person you suppose, and the father of the little boy; and tell me, my friend, was he saved from the wreck? Is he still alive? What has become of him?"

"This is indeed wonderful," exclaimed Harry, who had accompanied Mr. Hastings. "I can answer your questions. Your son has long been my most intimate friend, and is now my captain; he commands the Thisbe, and I trust before many weeks are over that the earnest desire of his heart will be fulfilled-that he will have the happiness of meeting the father he has so long desired to find. When I discovered Jack Headland, the faithful guardian of his early days, I congratulated myself that the only existing clue, as I supposed, on which my friend could depend for tracing his parents, had been found, though I little thought that it would be so rapidly followed up. I can assure you, sir, that you will have every reason to be proud of your son, for a more.noble and gallant fellow does not exist; and that he is your son I have not the shadow of a doubt."

Mr. Hastings, begging Jack to follow, retired to his hut accompanied by Harry, that he might learn from the honest seaman fuller particulars of everything relating to the boy he had brought up. Jack seemed to rejoice as much as he did, and to be fully convinced that he was right in his conjectures; and at length retired, leaving the two gentlemen alone.

"It is, indeed, wonderful, Mr. Castleton, that you and my son should have thus been brought together, and I trust that, whatever may occur, your friendship will continue as warm as ever."

As may be supposed, Harry was now doubly anxious for the arrival of Headland, contemplating the joy and satisfaction the discovery of his father would give him, and he longed also to be able to write to Julia, to tell her the reassuring news.

Still day after day went by and no sail appeared to cheer the sight of the shipwrecked party.

From whence did they come? Were they always so isolated? Were they in the beginning separate from other races? This it were hard to believe; for they resemble in the oldest elements of their civilisation the people who on the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile carried on in the morning of the world the peaceful pursuits of agriculture. They have like them had an imperial government and a written language, and they have studied astronomy, medicine, and the arts of weaving and river navigation. The ancient Chinese, when they undertook to subju

gato nature, did so not in the loose and imperfect way practised by shepherds, hunters, and dwellers in tents. They betook themselves rather to the industry of the cultivated field and to commercial pursuits; they ought not, therefore, without solid grounds, to be set down as precisely of the same race with those nomad tribes who, under the names of Kirghis, Turks, Mongols, and Toongoos, have for uncounted ages roamed over the grassy plains or stony desert of Tartary.

The question of the origin of the Chinese people must be looked at in the light of their ancient customs, language, institutions, and traditions. When this is done, with the help derivable from the anatomical structure of the Chinese type of man as compared with those of contiguous nations, we may hope to obtain satisfactory ethnological results. There have been four theories with regard to the origin of the Chinese. They have been supposed to be descendants of Cain, of Shem (Semitic), of Ham (Hamitic), and of Japheth (Indo-European and Turanian). Those four names are here used either as four historical personalities, or as types of four races. Those students of science who object to be bound by the Mosaic account of the first history of man and the peopling of the world, may regard these terms as typical of families separated by ethnic and linguistic characteristics. In the newest works on philology the words Semitic and Hamitic are commonly used, and indeed cannot in the present stage of our knowledge be conveniently dropped. If the word Japhetic has not kept its place with them, it has been because by modern philologists too little attention has been bestowed on the languages of the Tartar and Siberian tribes, and a fundamental difference of exaggerated extent has been supposed to exist between those languages and Indo-European speech. It will be seen on examination that a Mongol or Turkish verb is very like a verb of the Indo-European system, that the personal pronouns in these two linguistic areas resemble each other closely, and that the fondness shown by some languages of the Aryan stock for placing the verb at the end of the sentence is found in a still stronger degree among the tent-dwellers of Mongolia. Perhaps, then, a time may come when the name Japhetic may prove useful in philology. Should it seem best to limit the word Turanian to languages allied to the Turkish, and having made this limitation, should it be requisite to proceed still further, and to recognise a philological consanguinity between the Turanian and Indo-European families, it might become extremely convenient to adopt the name Japhetic to represent this larger family.

The first theory already alluded to of the origin of the Chinese is that which regards them as probably descended from Cain. The supporters of this view might very reasonably say that the Chinese records, while they speak of a partial and local deluge more than once occurring, have no tradition of the deluge of Noah, and that the descendants of Noah have this tradition. Cain and his posterity built cities, tilled the ground, and had their home on the east of Eden. They worked in brass and iron, handled the harp and organ, and had among them those who as dwellers in tents regarded sheep, oxen, and horses as the best possessions.

Some have thought that since the Chinese worked in metals from the most ancient time, as we know from their books, and since they have always loved

and practised an old-fashioned music destitute of counterpoint, and have had for their neighbours from immemorial time the nomad shepherds of the boundless plateau of High Asia, they may with probability be classed among the descendants of Cain.

It is an objection to this view that it begs the question respecting the deluge, assuming that the Cainites did not then perish. Though the deluge be now sometimes regarded as limited in territorial extent, on grounds of geology, we are not called to consider a merely partial destruction of the human race in the flood of Noah as an open question. Until this view shall become accepted, it is necessary for the advocates of the Cainite origin of the Chinese to clear their ground by proofs that the deluge was not universal for the race.

Further, the Chinese, when by the Turkestan route they came into their country, found it necessary to drive before them an aboriginal population whose languages are now found to be allied with those of Burmah and Siam. If, then, the Chinese came from Cain, who were these aborigines? The same name, Miau, now applied to the conquered and unconquered tribes of south-western China, was formerly applied to those who inhabited the centre and western portions of the empire, when, with martial odes and chariots of war, the Chinese generals of the old time, contemporaries of the Hebrew prophets, vanquished them in battle and took from them their territory. The Chinese cannot well have been descended from Cain unless the aborigines to whom they succeeded were the posterity of other children of Adam who travelled faster than the Cainites, and reached China at an earlier date.

Are the Chinese the children of Shem? In support of this view it may be mentioned that the Chinese and the Shemites were alike monotheists in the most ancient period. The Shangti of the Chinese was the Shaddai of the Shemites, and the spirits of the natural world worshipped by them resembled in some respects the angelic messengers of the Hebrews. Further, the Chinese emperors presented burnt sacrifices in addition to their other offerings when they adored the Supreme Spirit of heaven. They had one altar for the burnt sacrifice, and another for the sacrifices offered without burning, just as among the Hebrews there was an altar of burnt sacrifice and an altar of incense. The Chinese altar is ascended by steps, a mode of construction which, if it had not been forbidden, the Hebrews would willingly have practised.

The Chinese system of religion and social life is patriarchal. The chief of the state is the priest who officiates in behalf of the nation; the chief of a city or province acts in a religious capacity for the territory which he rules; the father of a family is the officiating priest of the family. The government by an emperor as understood by the ancient Chinese was nothing more than an extension of the patriarchal idea. The emperor and empress were in their view the father and mother of the people, and should love them, and advise them as their children.

But on the other side it should be remembered that the principles of the Hebrew and the other Shemite languages are very different from the Chinese. The words in their sentences are arranged in a very different order. The Hebrew, for example, always placed his adjective after the substantive which it qualifies. The Chineso does the opposite.

So, also, in regard to gender, the Hebrew attributes it to inanimate objects. The Chinese would never think of doing so. The Hebrew made tenses and moods by changing the vowel of his verbs, something as we do when we change "fight" to "fought," or "seethe" to "sodden." The Chinese never do The Hebrews love the dissyllable; the Chinese prefer the monosyllable.

So.

Further, the Chinese have no tradition of a deluge destroying the human race, while all Shemite peoples appear to have had this tradition. The rite of circumcision and the distinction between clean and unclean animals have been found not only in the Shemite area in Western Asia, but among distant tribes in Africa, in Polynesia, and on the slopes of the Himalayan mountain chain. Singularly enough, these things usually occur in connection with Shemite principles in language. If a tribe is found practising rites which remind the traveller of Shem and the religion of Shem, the grammar of the language, if examined, will be found to have laws which also indicate a certain oneness with the sons of Shem. The native of Tonga practises circumcision, and also places his adjective after the substantive. Many tribes residing near the Himalayan mountains avoid the flesh of the hog, and they also place the adjective after the substantive. It is not so with the Chinese. They have a habit of always placing the adjective before the substantive, and they possess none of the distinctively Semitic rites, except a dim tradition of a seventh day, in which, however, many of the best students of Chinese antiquity do not believe.

The high importance of the Hebrew record of the planting out of the nations over the world becomes increasingly apparent as the Babylonian inscriptions are deciphered by Rawlinson and Smith. It is thus shown that the Mosaic record, instead of being exclusively Jewish, represents also the common faith in regard to the early world and its history of the whole Shemite race. Since the traditions of the Chinese respecting the primitive history of men are very different, some seek elsewhere for their origin.

The third hypothesis connects the Chinese with Ham. Many circumstances render this hypothesis worthy of examination. The Hamites attained at an early period to high civilisation. The Egyptians were the teachers of the Greeks in the arts of agriculture and weaving. The race of Cush had much to do with the early prosperity of Babylon. The fruitful plains through which the Nile and the Euphrates flowed, nourished a population_distinguished in the arts and in commerce. But the Chinese were from the first fond of the same occupations. They used the plough; they had wheel carriages; they gave special honour to agriculture; they practised writing. The race of Ham originated the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the cuneiform writing of Babylon. If the Chinese were descended from Ham, we have three great nations of one race all practising writing. Is it not probable, since in Egypt and in Babylon the art of writing has been referred with good reason to the Hamite stem, that the Chinese also, who had a similar civilisation, were of the same race? We may then limit the problem of the origin of writing, and refer it with probability to one source. It should be remembered that tho old Babylonian writing was not wedge-shaped. It was at first ideographic and afterwards alphabetic. Subsequently it assumed the triangular shape known as "cuneiform." The wedge was the shape of the

implement employed in impressing the characters on soft bricks. But the Chinese writing was anciently of a different shape to the present. It is the pencil of wolf's hair or camel's hair that has determined the shape of modern Chinese writing. Formerly the fashion was to use a paint-brush or a graver. The characters were at first much more pictorial than at present. There is, therefore, not much reason for assuming that writing in China was of independent origination. Let us suppose this nation to have been primarily connected with the race of Ham. Their ancient love for observation of the stars and devotion to husbandry will then be accounted for. As the Chaldeans conquered the peaceable agriculturists of the Babylonian plain, and as the Arabian nomads overcame the industrious and much more numerous inhabitants of the Nile-watered valley of Egypt, so again and again the nomad tribes of the Mongolian pastures have subdued China and held in subjection for centuries its unwarlike people. The cultivation of the arts of peace made the Chinese weak and an easy prey to Tartar conquerors; but the reason why they felt an inclination for those arts is to be sought in ethnic predisposition-in fact, in a hereditary Ham-like love for those pursuits which in South-Western Asia and in North-Eastern Africa marked the chief nationalities that sprang from Ham.

The ancient religion of the Chinese being without images and destitute of mythological legends of personal gods, must be compared with the earliest religion of Egypt and Babylon as it was before the existence of the animal-worship of the one or the image-worship of the other. Any objection derived from the later religions, beliefs, and usages of those two ancient nations will probably be successfully met by removing the date of our inquiries to a period anterior to Fetishism and idolatry.

It may be also objected that the descendants of Ham are now black-skinned and curly-haired, and that the Chinese have yellow skins and straight hair. To this it may be replied that the negro, if really descended from Ham, has been made black by climate, and that he has lost the early civilisation and high intellectual capacity of his forefathers by isolation and the enervating influence of tropical moisture and sunshine. The antiquity of man on the earth is much greater than the Jewish rabbis supposed. If the race now negro had chanced to direct the course of its migration to a country like North China, where a temperate sun shines upon a well-watered country which possesses a porous, self-draining soil, and where a dry, cold air braces the human constitution each winter after the wasting influence of the preceding summer, the skin of the race would not have become black, and regular industry would have encouraged and regulated the progress of the intellect.

Only the fourth hypothesis now remains to be discussed. Are those ethnologists right who class the Chinese with the Turanian nations, including under that name Tartars and all eastern Asiatic peoples? Any scheme which embraces, whether as Allophylians or as Turanians, all the Eastern Asiatics without distinction, is open to several objections.

The Chinese have a fixed syntax in their language, and so have the Tartar tribes, yet the order of words differs materially. The Chinese order is that of nominative, verb, objective. The Tartar order is that of nominative, objective, verb. No exception is

allowed to this law. The Chinese word is a monosyllable, and the Tartar word a polysyllable. In Chinese those words which form tenses and moods are independent and separate. In Tartar, by agglutination they are attached to the root. Such decided marks of difference should render the philologist cautious in identifying the Chinese with the Mongol, the Manchu, or the Turk. There is sufficient variety to require a classification which distinguishes the Chinese from the Mongol type.

The quiet industry of the Chinese, their attachment to home, their fondness for farming and for commerce, their broad intellectual development, differentiate them very clearly from the roving people of Tartary, who love the freedom of the desert, are averse to the labours of the field, and only reluctantly handle the plough and the sickle.

The shepherd of the "land of grass," after witnessing, as he and his forefathers have been able to do for thousands of years, the farming and house comforts of the Chinese, their shops and markets, their spinning and weaving, still prefers his roving life on the Mongol prairie. Their connection of race with China must then be referred to a period very ancient indeed, previous to the appearance of the habits which now mark out so plainly their special type.

The social qualities of a people are very intimately blended with their language and their literature. The literature is sure to be found revealing the same characteristics as the language; the language owes its peculiarities to the mental and moral habits of the people.

The Mongols and Manchus have no literature except that which has been translated into their language from Sanscrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. Their speech reveals no indications of intellectual power; their habits are those of Arabs without the poetry and story-telling faculty which the countrymen of Mahomet owe to their Semitic parentage. The Tartar tribes, then, are not to be lightly classed with the Chinese, although bearing to them a strong physical resemblance.

Far less can the Aryan nations be on reasonable grounds connected with the Chinese. Those of Japheth's sons who wandered into Europe, Persia, and North India, have all had too rich a mental organisation, too energetic a military character, too grand a literary development, to allow fairly of any close relationship. An Aryan invasion of China, originating changes in the language and early history of that country, is a baseless modern dream for which there is no safe argument to be drawn either from the speech or from the books of the countrymen of Confucius.

The strongest arguments appear to be those which support the hypothesis of the derivation of the Chinese from the same stock as Cush and Mizraim.