from some Brahmins, and that they may have beheld the famous Stonehenge -probably within some thirty or forty years after its completion."

The sincere writer who now advocates the reality of the valuable cyfrinion,1 known to himself and brethren, labours hard to prove the existence of the same connection; but, as his bonds do not allow him to reveal them to the uninitiated, he maintains the contest with his right hand tied up, or rather fails to convince, as no satisfactory explanation can be given which is not conveyed in words of sincerity and truth.

But we have great light thrown upon the quotation supposed to be taken from Barddas, by a reference to the Egyptian mythology, and I make no apology for the following passage, taken from the Materia Hieroglyphica of Sir Gardener Wilkinson, p. 1:

"So little has been faithfully recorded, and, indeed, so little was known by ancient authors, of the deities of Egypt, that we cannot place much confidence in the vague accounts given by them. Admitting that the general division is correct, namely, eight principal deities, from whom were born twelve others, and from these again the remaining minor divinities, I proceed to point out the names of those that have been ascertained, beginning with the eight great gods.

"KNEF, NEF.

"The first of these is Knef, or Nef, the deity of Elephantine and the Thebaid. The sons of Ham had taught their descendants, the early inhabitants of this country, the true worship of one spiritual and eternal Being, who had alone disposed the order of the universe, divided the light from the darkness, and ordained the creation of mankind. But the Egyptians, in process of time, forsook the purer ideas of a single Deity, and admitted his attributes into a participation of that homage which was due to the Divinity himself. Kneph, or, more properly speaking, Neph, or Nef, was retained as the idea of the spirit of God."

And we learn from Plutarch that the inhabitants of the Thebais worship their god, Kneph, alone, whom they look upon as without a beginning, and also without end. All other deities, or quasi deities, must have been regarded as, partly at least, emanations from this spiritual and everlasting divinity. But this also is the doctrine embodied in the quotation, that from Nef came God, and everything having life.

1 Cov-rinion, mysteries or runes, understood by the initiated.

The worship paid by the Egyptians, not only to qualities, emanations, and abstract virtues of the one God, but also to animals, from the highest to the lowest, from the most useful to the most noxious, and to vegetables of all kinds, must have been grounded on this principle, and could never have been justified, as the defenders of such corruptions have often asserted, on the advantages derived to man from such productions.

I refer to my Gomer for a proof of the extent to which Nef and its derivatives entered into the religious systems of the ancient Gauls and Britons. This of itself proves the existence of a very early connection between these nations and Egypt, and, if with Egypt, with the whole ancient civilized world. And here I terminate, for the present, my explanation of the ancient doctrine upon this point.

I may, however, before I conclude, state that, in the three volumes of the Myfyrian Antiquities, there are numerous allu. sions, not only to the secret doctrines of the ancient Druids while yet heathens, but also ample expositions of the faith, morals, and ecclesiastical principles which the Cymry, when converted to the faith in Christ, adopted as their Christian institutes. These are especially to be found in the third volume, containing the collection called "Doethineb y Cumri,' the wisdom of the Cumri, and which is ascribed principally to St. Catog, and to a bard called Glas-y-gader.1 In my next communication I propose to return to the subject, and illustrate at some length the other doctrines contained in the quotations from Barddas.

I may add, that I am certain that they are genuine fragments of ancient lore, and that Dr. Owen Pughe or some other person copied them from some written document, which may perhaps be still forthcoming, should the surviving members of the chair of Glamorgan become, through God's grace, true Christians.

1 Otherwise "Glas-geraint," the glasgerion of the old English poets.

THE ANCIENT PHOENICIANS AND THEIR LANGUAGE.

Ir may now be accepted as a proved fact, that, of the generic language of mankind, there are, at least, two specific typesthe Indo-European language, and the Semitic: to the former belong the languages called Iranic, Indic, Hellenic, Italic, Winedic, Celtic, Teutonic; to the latter, the Arabian, Aramaic, and Hebrew dialects. The specific difference between these two classes is sufficiently marked to enable any good linguist to refer any language tolerably known to either of these branches, or to exclude it as not traceable to their types when once developed and formed. Now, the intention with which the present paper is written, is to examine whether there remain sufficient materials connected with the memorials of the ancient Phoenicians to enable scholars to decide whether that extraordinary people belonged to the Indo-Celtic or Semitic race. I am speaking not of the Taλao Phoenicians, but, to use the expression of Aristotle, of the rapraλaio-of those Phoenicians whom the Persian literati described as emigrants from the Erythræan Sea, and as foreign settlers in Phoenicia, where they established themselves as sea-traversing merchants. The words of Herodotus are:

"Now, the historians of the Persians say that the Phoenicians were the cause of the variance (between Europe and Asia), for they say that these having come from the sea called Erythra to this our sea, and having occupied that very country which they even now occupy, instantly applied themselves to long sea voyages."

This

may

be adduced as a proof that the Persians believed

the Phoenicians to be foreigners, who, at a very early period in Hellenic history, took possession of ancient Phoenicia.

The learned Persians, from whom Herodotus derived his information, must have well known the ethnology of central Asia, which at that period was governed by Persian satraps; and the fathers of many of them must have been present in the camp of Xerxes, where were collected, according to their races, the armed warriors of all the empire. They had been present in council with the Phoenician kings, when summoned by Xerxes, to give their advice respecting naval affairs, previous to the battle of Salamis: they were, therefore, adequate judges of the truth of the statement respecting their Eastern origin advanced by the Phoenicians, and confirmed it by their testimony. Now, the same Herodotus had been among the Phoenicians, of whom he gives this additional account:—

"Now, these Phoenicians in ancient times dwelt long, as they themselves say, upon the sea Erythra, but having thence set out, and having crossed over Syria, they inhabit the maritime coast of the Levant. Now, both this position of Syria, and the whole country as far as Egypt, is called Palestine.”

As to the period when this emigration and new settlement, traditionally recorded by the Phoenicians, and confirmed by the learned Persians, took place, we must be content to refer it to a vague antiquity, the age of Io, the daughter of Inachus, which epoch Mr. Fynes Clinton is pleased to fix some sixteen generations from the siege of Troy. In his own words, "Inachus, the father of Phoroneus, was the highest term in Grecian history." The commencement of Hellenic history dates from the Argive Inachus. Africanus makes him a little older than Moses; Eusebius has placed Moses 300 years below him, but agrees with Africanus in placing Inachus 700 years before the fall of Troy. Other traditions, however, to which Pausanias refers, make Phoroneus the first king. Acusilaus records this tradition" For Acusilaus says that Phoroneus was the first man, whence also the poet of the Phoronis says that he was

1 Fasti, Hellenici, vol. i.

the father of mortal men." According to other traditions, Inachus, not Phoroneus, was the first man, the autoXow, the son of the earth. Now, this was an inveterate error among the Hellenic archæologists. They continually created their ancestors, and referred their origin to trees, stones, rivers, or gods and goddesses. The ancient nations of the East might well laugh at their credulity and folly on this point. But modern authors, who write as if the first emigrators from the East must have found Europe occupied by wild savages, are practically guilty of the same folly, and would hold with Tacitus, that the ancient Germans must have sprung from the soil, seeing that no settlers from a better climate would have ever emigrated into such a dreary, marshy, cold, ungenial, and uncleared region. But we now know that the languages spoken in ancient Germany, although they may have been corrupted in various regions and various modes, are really cognate with Greek and Latin, and must have been conveyed, together with their speakers, from some common home, after that period which had separated the Indo-Celtic from the Semitic type. Now, there are various forms, both of the vocables and grammar, which Indo-Celtic dialects have assumed in Europe, which may be exemplified in the Greek, Latin, and ancient Teutonic and Celtic tongues. The question, which of these approaches nearer, and recedes further from, the original model, or whether the various, either developments or decadences, took place in the original seats, or were worked out in the several localities in Europe, is one more easily asked than answered, but which, nevertheless, has a very close connection with the affiliation of tongues, and the history of the human race. Those who accept the Scripture accounts of the origin of man, and the leading events in primeval times, as trustworthy records, hold that the first man and the first woman were made by God Himself, by an immediate miraculous act, and that the whole human race springs from that pair, and that these were represented after the deluge by the patriarch Noah and his sons, who handed down to their posterity one tongue, which became at a later period miraculously