e dark, black
hair, and the scanty beard all proclaim the Manchus and Koreans as the
nearest congeners of the Japanese. This authority considers it
positive that the latter are a Tungusic race, and that their own
traditions and the whole course of their history are incompatible with
any other conclusion than that Korea is the route by which the
immigrant tribes made their entry into Kiushiu from their original
Manchurian home. While accepting this theory with some reservations, I
may remark that I altogether fail to see what the "whole course" of
Japanese history has to do with the matter. Japanese history, as I
have previously observed, is almost altogether legendary, and proves
nothing except the credulity of those who have accepted it as
statements of fact. Ethnology, I admit, is a most interesting field
for speculation. It is one in which the mind can positively run riot
and the imagination revel. The wildest theories have been put forward
in regard to many of the world's races, and philological arguments of
the thinnest possible kind have been used to bolster them up. For
example, one very able writer on this matter has broached a theory
respecting the origin of the Japanese, and supported it by what seems
to be very plausible evidence. He assumes, on what grounds I know
not, that there was a white race earlier in the field of history than
the Aryans, and that the seat of this white race was in High Africa.
That it was from Africa that migrations were made to North, Central,
and South America, as well as to Egypt, and subsequently to Babylonia
and, apparently, to India. In due course, according to this authority,
Syria and Babylonia were conquered by the Semites, while the Aryans
became masters of Europe, Asia Minor, and India. The suggestion is
that the conquerors of the Japanese islands and the founders of the
Japanese language and mythology were of the Turano-African type. That
these invaders intermarried with a mixed short race, and that the new
dominating Japanese race maintained and propagated their dialect of
the language and their sect of the religion, and displaced the pure
natives. The same authority suggests that when the Pacific route to
America was closed by the weakness of the Turano Africans and the
rising of cannibals and other savages (where did they rise from?) the
Japanese were isolated on the east. On their west the Turano-African
dynasties in China and Korea fell, and were replaced by natives, t