nations, to be "swallowed up among the Gentiles," Hosea viii. 8, "forgetting their Maker," and yet "building temples," v. 11-14, and "making many altars to sin," by what name or names would the outcast nation be known?

B.C.

The name Gomer points definitely to Scythia, and Herodotus, the heathen historian of that era, says very much about the Scythian tribes of a closely following age. Herodotus lived from 484 to 430 He speaks of the Getoe and the Sace among the Scythians, and the Budini among the Medes. Of the Gete, as the most noble of the tribes of ancient Thrace (afterwards called Moesia and Bulgaria), neighbours to the Saco, the Royal Scythians,-"The Geto," he says, "who believe in their immortality and declare that they do not die, but pass into the presence of their god Zal Moxis, to whom they despatch a messenger every five years. The Greeks," he adds, "suppose that the Geto derived their belief for immortality from Pythagoras, but I believe Zal Moxis to have lived long before his time." *

The wars of the Medes and Persians which desolated those parts of Media and Assyria to which the captives had been exiled, are not so narrated by any profane historian as to give the least clue to the relation the Israelites held to those peoples, but the SACE and the GET

are beginning at that time to take a marked name and a place in the world's history. It has been conjectured, and with great probability, that the then desolate "high places of Isaac" (Amos vii. 7) had furnished the stock of these newly predominant races. They could scarcely have been traced by their language, for being swallowed up among nomad nations, and intermarrying with them, would not favour the preservation of any national language; and the dialects of wandering tribes in Central America are quoted by Max Muller as found by missionaries to have been entirely changed even in the course of ten years.

WERE THE GITTITES THE EARLIEST GÉTÉ ?

A tribe of the Gittites (Gété) had dwelt in near, and sometimes in friendly, neighbourhood with the children of Isaac in Palestine. Hence, possibly, the Saco and Getœ of Herodotus.

Two remarkable individual Gittites (Gété) come into notice in Scripture. Obededom was a Gittite (2 Sam. vi. 10), and when David would not remove the ark of the Lord into the city of David, after * Za el Moxis, the God of Moses, has been a proposed rendering of this name, and the name of their country, Moesia, has a similar affinity.

Uzzah's breach, he carried it aside into the house of Obededom, where it continued for three months; and the Lord blessed Obededom and all his household, and all that pertained unto him, because of the ark of God, as has He not in the latter days blessed for similar reasons his possibly Indo-European descendants, the Goths, conjointly with the Saxons?

The noble ITTAI, too, was a Gittite, who brought 600 men from Gath to David's aid when he fled from his son Absalom. David spoke to him individually as a stranger in Judah, and an exile, recently "but yesterday"-come into the land, and courteously bade him return; but Ittai answers almost in the words of Ruth to Naomi, "In what place my lord the King shall be, whether in death or life, even there also will thy servant be;" and David soon after makes him general of a third part of his army. 2 Sam. xv. 21.

We have not now space to follow the Saco and the Getoe with Sharon Turner, in their migrations to Europe, towards which they overflowed in successive waves of population, as Celts, and Sclaves, and Teutons, till we trace them down to the modern lineage of Saxe-Gotha, in close alliance with our own present Royal Family. That research must belong to the story of their early MSS. Gothic and Saxon BIBLES. But Mrs. Ingalls's recent specific mission to the votaries of SACYA BUDDH, in 1871, rather bids us mark the advent of the mingled Aryan and Scythic race in India, for we are surely informed that it is recorded in Buddhistic rock inscriptions that the Getoe and the Saco were once associated in the establishment of a religious dominion extending from Bactria to all parts of the East.

THE PEOPLING OF INDIA. ARYAN OR INDO-EUROPEAN.

"Sanscrit is not the mother of European languages; it is only their elder sister."—Max Muller on the Science of Language.

The masters of language have discovered during this century that both the Eastern and Western nations have derived words and thoughts from some common source, called by them Aryan and Indo-European, which they date as at least more ancient than Moses. They dwell on the obscurity of this source, but admit the Indo-European to involve much of the Semitic element.

"The Rig Veda," says Dr. Margoliouth, in a lecture on India and the Indians, "terms the aborigines of this country, among other names, Asooras. I am persuaded they have several different ancestors in the patriarchs who peopled the earth, not long after the Flood.

There is probably a relation between the Asooras, and the Asshurim of Scripture. In the inscriptions of Nineveh, Asshur is invariably written Asura. The Bible mentions three families of that name: first, as descended from Ham (Gen. x. 11)—

'Out of that land [Shinar] went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh.' Secondly, as descended from Shem (Gen. x. 22)—

'The children of Shem; Elam, and Asshur.'

Thirdly, from Abraham by Keturah (Gen. xxv. 3)—

'And the sons of Dedan [her grandson] were Asshurim,' etc.

“I would suggest, that these respective Asooras successively found their way into the vast continent, which we call India. We still find a trace of the name in the 'Soora' tribe of Orissa; the physiognomies of the aborigines are very varied. When the children of Abraham followed the descendants of Ham and Shem into those regions, we can account for the high sounding Brahma; the last invaders knew that Abraham was the friend of God, and their offspring eventually, through ignorance, made a god of him. Later Brahmins conjured up the fable of the egg," etc.

"The Aryan languages together," says Max Muller, "point to a period when the first ancestors of the Indians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, the Sclaves, and the Teutons were living together in a small clan, settled probably on the highest elevation of Central Asia, speaking a language neither Sanscrit, nor Greek, nor German, but containing the dialectic germs of all." With this Aryan element the exiled Saco and the Getoe must have mingled in the country of the Medes and Persians, as well as with the all-pervading Scythian or Turanian in the time of Herodotus; and this interferes not at all with the earlier peopling of India by mixed races descending from Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and probably projecting themselves frequently by emigration southward. Afterward came the time when from Armenia issued three lines of emigration known to history-"the first to the westward, into Asia Minor, thence into Greece, Italy, and Sicily; the second, through the Caucasus and the steppes beyond the Black Sea, into Northern and Western Europe; while the third line, passing to the south of the Caspian, found its way across the mountains of Affghanistan to Cashmere and Orissa, and again settled on the Indus."

In Affghanistan to this day these last leave their traces. It is quite certain that an extensive Israelite (or Saco) influence must have been

from a very early period at work amongst that people; the Khyber (Khabour) Pass and the Suliman (Solomon) Range attest it. They are still, in their own idea, the "Beni Israel," and meanwhile they despise the Jews as much as any Mahommedan people can. They have made this distinction between Israel and Judah, whom they call Yahoodee, from time immemorial. The early name of the prinOne of the Affghan tribes is

cipality of Oude was Yahoodiyah. named Yousufzyes, or Joseph (zie meaning tribe); and next to them are the Isakzie, or Isaac tribe. These were not their names in their own land, but it shows that they have remembered the promise, “In Isaac shall thy seed be called" (Genesis xxi. 12). There are also Isakzie in Independent Tartary and Bokhara. The Greeks rendered this term Isakzie into Sakai, or Saco. But we see that Herodotus likewise mentions Budini. The two derivations are conjoined in "Sacya Buddh." The word "Baddhai" occurs in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah xvi. 6, where our translators have rendered it "lies,” and in Hosea xi. 6, where they have rendered it "branches." Both cannot be correct. The term, however, was familiar to the Israelites, as applied to divisions of their own people, and hence the term Buddhist might come to be applied to some special branch in particular; and, with regard to the superstitions of Buddhism, how long may not the Lord have been saying, "Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone."

The story of the Golden Umbrella of Rangoon is a very recent and living example of an old and most enduring idolatry. The Sacya Buddh, or Godama, whose sacred relics of tooth and hair are still considered worthy of a new gold umbrella about every hundred years, is said to have been the last of four Buddhs, purifiers or incarnations of wisdom, who appeared in India. This last Buddh remained upon the earth about eighty years, between the years 625 and 543 B.C. He announced that there would be yet one other Buddh after him— Arumaday, and that then the present order of things would cease. Sir Henry Rawlinson tells us that the Saco or (so called) Scythians, who are also termed Gemiri (Gomeri) by their Semitic neighbours, first appear in the Nineveh inscriptions as a distinct people under Esarhaddon about B.C. 684. They were at that time in the Kurdish mountains, and ruled over by a king, Teispa, whose name betrays his Aryian descent, while the "Gomeri ” seem about the year 670 to have grown bold enough to threaten the Assyrian frontier.

We have the Sakai warrior on the Rock of Behistun inscribed by Darius, B.C. 521, with his tall stiff cap rising to a point, towards

which a slight bend shows us that it is made of felt, not metal, like the caps of the Assyrians. And that inscription classifies the languages of the populations of Western Asia in the time the rock was written, by its edict in three columns, Semitic, Indo-European, and Turanian, and still to this day in the unchanging East the edict of the rulers there must be issued in three languages, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, once again, Semitic, Aryan, and Tartar. The Turks being now the least numerous, but the ruling race, and Ishmael's children, as yet the oppressors of Isaac's.

The previous Buddhs have left nothing behind them but oral tradition, till there arose the fourth, distinguished as Sacya, probably of the race of the Saco, the Geto, and the Buddhi, the new Aryans returning to India, and he leaves with his disciples ten commandments, many of them exactly like those given to Moses by God on Sinai. 1. Do not kill. 2. Do not steal. 3. Do not commit impurity. 4. Do not bear false witness. 5. Do not lie. 6. Do not 7. Shun scandal. 8. Do not covet. 9. Seek not revenge. 10. Be not bigoted. All commending themselves to the conscience, but avoiding reference to the love of God or the Creator. Divine authority is not quoted, and Buddh's own authority substituted and enforced as the source of a new Revelation.

swear.

The

It is said that he engaged in a spiritual struggle for regeneration for a week of weeks. While tracing his origin to the kingdom of God, he owns that he derived a sinful disposition from an earthly mother. He abhors himself, and repents in dust and ashes; ever strives for purification, and renounces all he values for the sake of a higher life.

At last, passing through a burning fiery furnace, in which he is still taught wisdom, he reaches heaven by his own merits and sufferings, though he professes to believe in unbounded mercy, so obtained; he therefore preached repentance, pardon, self-negation, in dark sayings, truly, but his doctrine met, in some measure, the sighings of man's soul, and his disciples grew by millions He had declared that he could heal the sorrows of others by his stripes, almost in the words of the prophet Isaiah. His doctrines have doubtless been overlaid with many mystic symbols by his ignorant and superstitious followers. There can be little doubt that all the light he had came from what he knew or had heard of the Hebrew Bible. Yet what millions of souls has he misled, and debarred from access to the true fountain of obtaining mercy, an example of the influence of the Aryan or even Semitic mind, apart from Revelation. Buddhism has left