Tradition : Principally with Reference to Mythology and the

PRIMITIVE LIFE. 37
If we estimate-taking the minimum or the maximum
either according to the Hebrew or Septuagint
version-the time it would have taken these populations,
according to the slow progress of the dispersion, to have
arrived at their destinations from the plain of Sennaar
(Mesopotamia), the period may be equally conjectured
to correspond with that which tradition marks as the
commencement of the iron age, when the world was
becoming overcrowded, and the increasing populations
came into collision.
Neither is it a difficulty,13 it rather appears to me in
accordance with tradition, that if this surmise be correct,
the earliest arrival in the Indian Peninsula should have
been of those who took the longest route. For it is natural
to suppose that the proscribed and weakest races, e.g.
the Canaanitish, would have been the first to depart, and
to depart by the north-east and west, the more powerful
families having passed down and closed the southeast
exit by way of the lower valleys of the Euphrates.
These latter would have spread themselves out in the
13 I find this conjecture confirmed in the pages of the most recent
authority on the subject, Mr Brace, "Ethnology," p. 13, 14-"On the
continent of Asia the Turanians were probably the first who figured as
nations in the ante-historical period. Their emigrations began long before
the wanderings of the Aryans and Semites, who, wherever they went,
always discovered a previous population, apparently of Turanian origin,
which they either expelled or subdued." According to Max Mill er's
hypothesis there were two migrations, one northern and one southern
[corresponding to the migration as above], "the latter settling on the
rivers Meikong, Meinam, Irrawaddy, and Bramapootra," . . . "a third to
the scuth [probably an advance of the previous one], is believed to tend
toward Thibet and India, and in later times pours its hordes through the
Himalaya, and forms the original population of Analogy may be
discovered in " the two streams or lines of Celtic migration," which, saj
Bunsen (" Philosophy of Univ. Hist." i. 148) " we may distinguish by the
names of the Western and Eastern stream, the/ormer, althou
direct, seems to be historically the more ancient, and to have reached this
country (Britain) several centuries before the other."