DELIVERED BEFORE The Asiatic Society: AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS, ON THE RELIGION, POETRY, LITERATURE, ETC. BY SIR WILLIAM JONES. WITH AN Essay on his Name, Talents, and Character. BY THE RIGHT HON. LORD TEIGNMOUTH. SELECTED AND EDITED BY JAMES ELMES, AUTHOR OF LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE, ETC. BODI IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON: PRINTED FOR CHARLES S. ARNOLD, TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, 1824. SIR WILLIAM JONES'S DISCOURSES. DISCOURSE IX. DELIVERED FEBRUARY 23, 1792. ON THE ORIGIN AND FAMILIES OF NATIONS. Philosophical proposition of the whole of mankind proceeding from one pair of our species.-Observations on the books of Moses. The establishment of the only human family after the deluge; and its diffusion. GENTLEMEN, You have attended with so much indulgence to my discourses on the five Asiatic nations, and on the various tribes established along their several borders, or interspersed over their mountains, that I cannot but flatter myself with an assurance of being heard with equal attention, while I trace to one centre the three great families, from which those nations appear to have proceeded, and then hazard a few conjectures on the different courses, which they may be supposed to have taken, towards the countries in which we find them settled at the dawn of all genuine history. Let us begin with a short review of ue proposi B tions to which we have gradually been led, and separate such as are morally certain from such as are only probable: that the first race of Persians and Indians, to whom we may add the Romans and Greeks, the Goths, and the old Egyptians or Ethiops, originally spoke the same language and professed the same popular faith, is capable, in my humble opinion, of incontestible proof; that the Jews and Arabs, the Assyrians or second Persian race, the people who spoke Syriac, and a numerous tribe of Abyssinians, used one primitive dialect wholly distinct from the idiom just mentioned, is, I believe undisputed, and I am sure, indisputable; but that the settlers in China and Japan had a common origin with the Hindus, is no more than highly probable; and that all the Tartars, as they are inaccurately called, were primarily of a third separate branch, totally differing from the two others in language, manners, and features, may indeed be plausibly conjectured, but cannot, from the reasons alleged in a former essay, be perspicuously shown, and for the present therefore must be merely assumed. Could these facts be verified by the best attainable evidence, it would not, I presume, be doubted that the whole earth was peopled by a variety of shoots from the Indian, Arabian, and Tartarian branches, or by such intermixtures of them, as in a course of ages might naturally have happened. Now I admit without hesitation the aphorism of Linnæus, that "in the beginning God created one pair only of every living species, which has a diversity of sex" but, since that incomparable naturalist argues principally from the wonderful diffusion of vegetables, and from an hypothesis that the water on this globe has been continually subsiding, I venture to produce a shorter and closer argument in support of his doctrine. That Nature, of which simplicity appears a distinguishing attribute, does nothing in vain, is a maxim in philosophy; and against those who deny maxims, we cannot dispute; but it is vain and superfluous to do by many means what may be done by fewer, and this is another axiom received into courts of judicature from the schools of philosophers: we must not therefore, says our great Newton, admit more causes of natural things than those which are true, and sufficiently account for natural phenomena; but it is true, that one pair at least of every living species must at first have been created; and that one human pair was sufficient for the population of our globe in a period of no considerable length, (on the very moderate supposition of lawyers and political arithmeticians, that every pair of ancestors left on an average two children, and each of them two more) is evident from the rapid increase of numbers in geometrical progression, so well known to those who have ever taken the trouble to sum a series of as many terms as they suppose generations of men in two or three thousand years. It follows, that the Author of Nature (for all nature proclaims its divine Author) created but one pair of our species; yet, had it not been (among other reasons) for the devastations which history has recorded of water and fire, wars, famine, and pestilence, this earth would not now have had room for its multiplied inbabitants. If the human race then be, as we may confidently assume, of one natural species, they must all have proceeded from one pair; and if perfect justice be, as it is most indubitably, an essential attribute of GOD, that pair must have been gifted |