Samoyed, Tongouse, Mandchu, Boriate-Mongol, Turkish, Finno-Hungarian, are all subdivided into numerous varieties, which may be respectively referred to a common type, living or extinct. A few of these languages, Mandchu, Mongolian, Ouigour, Turkish, Magyar, and Suomi, have been the expression of literatures more or less rich, which are often interesting, and worthy of the part played in the world by the peoples which speak them.

CHAPTER III.

THE AGGLUTINATIVE IDIOMS OF

SOUTHERN ASIA.

The Caucasian languages: Tcherkesse group; Kartvelien or Georgian group-The language of the Shumirs or Accadians-Brahui dialect -Non-Aryan India : Kol-Aryan group (Djuangs, Birhors, Korvas, Moundas, Hos, Kharrias, Sonthals); Dravidian group-Dravidians of the North: Oraons, Paharyas, Gonds, Khonds-Dravidians of the Dekkan: dialects spoken by fifty millions of people : Tulu, Kanara, Tamil, Malayala, Telinga-Dravidian phonetics and literature.

THE violent and tardy incursions of the Uralo-Altaïc peoples have led us far into Europe, and we must now return upon our steps to complete the chart of the agglutinative languages of Asia. Let us press along the northern coast of the Black Sea, where we have found more than one Tatar or Mongolian group, and re-enter Asia by the gorges of the Caucasus. It is a strange region, both from the place which it occupies in ancient tradition and from the inextricable mixture of the tribes which inhabit it. This region has had the honour of bestowing its name, of unknown origin, upon the whole white race. It contains the mountain on which, according to Jerome, the Ark of the Deluge was stayed, Ararat, and the summit on which the vengeance of Zeus bound Prometheus, the ravisher of fire; and finally, the highest northern summit of the great chain, Mount Elbruz, as well as the Persian Elbourz to the south of the Caspian, still bears the name of the

legendary holy mountain known to the Persians under the name of Hara - Barazaiti, and to the Greeks as Berecynth.

The ancient traditions collected in the Bible have retained for us the former names of the Tuplai or Tibarenians, of the Muskai or Moschians (inhabitants of Colchis, Georgia, during the Assyrian and Persian period), Tubal and Meshech, sons of Japhet, whom the Jewish sometimes associate with Gomer (the Cimmerians), and Togarma, "who comes from the north wind with all his troops." From the information furnished by Herodotus, by Hecateus, and by the cuneiform inscriptions, we gather that the ancients had a very clear idea of the inhabitants of Armenia, who were gradually driven back towards the southern slopes of the Caucasus, and a slighter acquaintance with the peoples of the other side, Scythians and Cimmerians, who had, however, more than once invaded and disturbed Asia.

After having been a refuge for more or less compact groups of ancient peoples, driven out and broken up by better armed races, the Caucasus became a passage, at least on its eastern and western borders, not only to the Scythians, those multitudes of unknown race, doubtless of very mixed blood, who overthrew the first Chaldean empire, and drove the Hyksos or Shepherds on to the Egypt of the Pharaohs, but also for the vanguard of the Hellenes, the Ionians of Lydia and Phrygia, who transmitted to their descendants, the fabled Argonauts, a vivid recollection of Colchis; and also probably for the future Armenians, who came and settled precisely within the borders of the ancient Alarodian or Georgian race at Van, near the great lake, near the tri-lingual inscriptions, of which a

column may perhaps enlighten us as to the early forms of Georgian. Strabo counted in Caucasia seventy peoples and seventy dialects. The Romans maintained as many as one hundred and thirty interpreters on the frontier at Sebastopol. Aboulfeda called the Caucasus the mountain of languages. Many of these languages are in process of extinction, and the comparative study of them becomes every day more difficult. Yet, if we are guided by the information collected by Klaproth, by Baron Uslar, and by the Russian Academician Schifner, the classification will not be very complicated. But we must first carefully exclude the Armenian of the banks of the Araxes, Ossetan, an Iranian idiom which has taken refuge in a central district to the south-east of Elbruz, modern Persian, and the Tatar or Turkish of Aderbaidjan, which are all spoken on the south-western coasts of the Caspian, and also Nogai and Koumouk, which are found at different parts of the northern basin. We thus isolate the Caucasian group properly so called, represented to the north of the Caucasus by the Abazes, the Tcherkesses, the Kistes, the Tchetchenes, and the Lesghians from the Black Sea to Daghestan; to the south of the Caucasus, by the Imerethians, Mingrelians, and Lazes, by the Georgians and Suanians, between the Black Sea and the middle basin of the Cyrus and of the Arax (now Koura and Aras). On the maps and in the geography of Reclus will be found the names of numerous tribes often very interesting from some characteristic custom, some ancient belief, from the beauty of their type, or from their courageous resistance to the Russian dominion. But from the linguistic point of view they probably belong to one or other of the two divisions which we mentioned above.

It is doubtful whether the whole of the northern

or Circassian group has a common origin; it has been so disorganised, so nearly obliterated, by the Russian conquest, that I doubt if it now comprises a million individuals. The Tcherkesse nation, which was Mussulman, has almost all dispersed, and has been replaced by Slavs and Germans. A few Tcherkesse legends have been collected; the language is hard, remarkable for certain sounds which are peculiar to it, and for the incorporation of the suffixes of number.

The southern or Kartvelian group, early converted to Christianity, remains intact though not independent, to the number of one or two millions in the neighbourhood of Koutaïs and Tiflis. It corresponds geographically to the Colchis and Iberia of the ancients. Its principal dialect, Georgian, has an alphabet. Cultivated in the Middle Ages, it belongs, like Circassian, to the agglutinative class. It was probably akin to the language of the Aghovanik or Albanians, which disappeared completely in the fifteenth century, leaving no traces in writing of its existence. The Georgian chronicles have been translated into French by M. Brosset. The names Iberians and Albanians, Georgians, Suanians, and Kartvelians require some explanation. The two first, which must not be confounded with the Albanians of Epirus and the Iberians of Spain, are somewhat ancient. Albanian-Alwank in Armenian-is mentioned in the time of Alexander. Iberian, through the forms Wirq in Armenian, Avir in Pehlevi, 'Aßepes in Greek, goes back to a form Σαβειροι, Σασπιρες, given by Herodotus. The Saspires made part of the army of Xerxes. Georgian comes from the name of the saint chosen for patron by the Iberians. Kartvelian, Kartouli, is really a national name; Karthlos, the eponymous hero of the

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