incorporated with such scanty specimens of each caste any of the barbarous natives--they would leave all the natives to a caste by themselves. And an Egyptian hierophant would as little have thought of associating with himself a Pelasgic priest, as a Bramin would dream of making a Bramin caste out of a set of Christian clergymen. But if no Egyptian hierophant accompanied the immigrators, doubly ridiculous is it to suppose that the latter would have raised any of their own body, to whom such a change of caste would be impious, and still less any of the despised savages, to a rank the most honoured and the most reverent which Egyptian notions of dignity could confer. Even the very lowest Egyptians would not touch any thing a Grecian knife had polluted--the very rigidity with which caste was preserved in Egypt would forbid the propagation of castes among barbarians so much below the very lowest caste they could introduce. So far, therefore, from Egyptian adventurers introducing such an institution among the general population, their own spirit of caste must rapidly have died away as intermarriage with the natives, absence from their countrymen, and the active life of an uncivilized home, mixed them up with the blood, the pursuits, and the habits of their new associates. Lastly, If these arguments (which might be easily multiplied) do not suffice, I say it is not for me more completely to destroy, but for those of a contrary opinion more completely to substantiate, an hypothesis so utterly at variance with the Athenian character--the acknowledged data of Athenian history; and which would assert the existence of institutions the most difficult to establish;--when established, the most difficult to modify, much more to efface. [72] The Thessali were Pelasgic. [73] Thucyd., lib. i. [74] Homer--so nice a discriminator that he dwells upon the barbarous tongue even of the Carians--never seems to intimate any distinction between the language and race of the Pelasgi and Hellenes, yet he wrote in an age when the struggle was still unconcluded, and when traces of any marked difference must have been sufficiently obvious to detect--sufficiently interesting to notice. [75] Strabo, viii. [76] Pausan., viii.