olars and discoverers to stand at the head of the page of
reliable history, and to form the basis of all scientific ethnography.

The diversity of languages among mankind seems not to have attracted the
attention of the Greek philosophers. When modern inquirers began to
investigate the matter, they were well-nigh confounded by the multitude
of dialects and languages. The labor of three generations of scholars
has been expended upon philology, the most ancient monument of mankind.
And the result is that all the various languages of earth have at length
been classified under three tongues--the Shemitic, the Aryan, and the
Turanian. But this most recent discovery of comparative philology was
narrated by Moses thirty centuries ago, with the historical account of
the origin of the division of the primeval family into three separate
colonies, colonizing the earth after their families and after their
tongues.--Genesis x. 32. The discovery of this coincidence fills Bunsen
with astonishment. "Comparative philology," he says, "would have been
compelled to set forth as a postulate the supposition of some such
division of languages in Asia, especially on the ground of the relation
of the Egyptian language to the Shemitic, even if the Bible had not
assured us of the truth of this great historical event. It is truly
wonderful; it is a matter of astonishment; it is more than a mere
astounding fact that something so purely historical, and yet divinely
fixed--something so conformable to reason, and yet not to be conceived
of as a mere natural development--is here related to us out of the
oldest primeval period, and which now for the first time, through the
new science of philology, has become capable of being historically and
philosophically explained."

The brief, yet definite, assertions of the Hamitic origin of the old
empire of Babylon, and of an Asiatic Cush or Ethiopia, which have been
so repeatedly charged against the Bible as blunders, even by some
profound scholars, have been vindicated by the recent discoveries in the
mounds of Chaldea Proper of multitudes of inscriptions in a language
which Sir H. Rawlinson affirms "is decidedly Cushite or Ethiopian," and
the modern languages to which it makes the nearest approaches are those
of Southern Arabia and Abyssinia. The old traditions have then been
confirmed by comparative philology, and both are side lights to
Scripture. * * * "The primitive race which bore sway in Chaldea Proper