First and foremost, it seems primarily unnecessary to suggest at all that they came from anywhere; for, if the position be once assumed as an axiom that all people must have immigrated from some place to the place in which we first find them, or hear of them, then the double question arises: "Why should the persons we find in A., and who, we think, may have come from B., not have migrated from A. to B. before they migrated back from B. to A.?" Or: "If the people we find at A. must have come from B., whence did the people at B. come, before they went to A.?" To put it in another way: given the existence 4000 or 5000 years ago of Chinese in China, Egyptians in Egypt, and Babylonians in Babylonia--why should one group be assumed to be older than the other? The only ground for suggesting that these groups had not each a separate evolution, is the assumption that man was "created" once for all, and created summarily; in which case it follows with mathematical precision that the ultimate ancestry of every man living extends back to exactly the same date. That is to say, the highest and the lowest, the blackest and the whitest, only differ in this, that some men began to keep records earlier than others; for the man who keeps no records loses track of his ancestors, and that is all. Not to mention other races, some of our own noblest English families trace back their ancestry to a favoured or successful person, who was of no hereditary distinction before he distinguished himself; whilst on the other hand the tramp and the street-walker may have as "royal" blood in their veins as any lineal princely personage. It is records, therefore, that differentiate "civilized" from uncivilized people, blue blood from plebeian; and as we see millions of people living without records to-day in various parts of the world, notwithstanding that for centuries, or even for millenniums, they have been surrounded by or in immediate contact with neighbours possessing records, it seems to follow that a nation's greatness may begin at any time, independently of the blueness of its blood, the robustness of its warriors, the beauty of its women; that is, whenever it chooses to keep records, and thus to cultivate itself: for records are nothing more than the means of keeping experiences in stock, instead of having to repeat them every day; they are thus accumulations of national wealth. It by no means follows that because records can be traced back farther in the case of one nation than in the case of another, that the first nation is older than the other; for instance, although in the West our various alphabets appear to refer themselves back to one same source, or to a few sources which probably all hark back ultimately to one and the same, there seems no reason to believe that the Chinese did not independently invent, develop, and perfect their own scheme of written records: the mere fact that we learnt how to write is some evidence in support of the proposition that they