In going through historical Greece, we are compelled to accept the Hellenic aggregate with its constituent elements as a primary fact to start from, because the state of our information does not enable us to ascend any higher. By what circumstances, or out of what preëxisting elements, this aggregate was brought together and modified, we find no evidence entitled to credit. There are, indeed, various names which are affirmed to designate ante-Hellenic inhabitants of many parts of Greece,—the Pelasgi, the Leleges, the Kurêtes, the Kaukônes, the Aones, the Temmikes, the Hyantes, the Telchines, the Bœotian Thracians, the Teleboæ, the Ephyri, the Phlegyæ, etc. These are names belonging to legendary, not to historical Greece,—extracted out of a variety of conflicting legends, by the logographers and subsequent historians, who strung together out of them a supposed history of the past, at a time when the conditions of historical evidence were very little understood. That these names designated real nations, may be true, but here our knowledge ends. We have no well-informed witness to tell us their times, their limits of residence, their acts, or their character; nor do we know how far they are identical with or diverse from the historical Hellens,—whom we are warranted in calling, not, indeed, the first inhabitants of the country, but the first known to us upon any tolerable evidence. If any man is inclined to call the unknown ante-Hellenic period of Greece by the name of Pelasgic, it is open to him to do so; but this is a name carrying with it no assured predicates, noway enlarging our insight into real history, nor enabling us to explain—what would be the real historical problem—how or from whom the Hellens acquired that stock of dispositions, aptitudes, arts, etc., with which they begin their career. Whoever has examined the many conflicting systems respecting the Pelasgi,—from the literal belief of Clavier, Larcher, and Raoul Rochette, (which appears to me, at least, the most consistent way of proceeding,) to the interpretative and half-incredulous processes applied by abler men, such as Niebuhr, or O. Müller, or Dr. Thirlwall,[420]—will not be displeased with my resolution to decline so insoluble a problem. No attested facts are now present to us—none were present to Herodotus and Thucydidês, even in their age—on which to build trustworthy affirmations respecting the ante-Hellenic Pelasgians. And where such is the case, we may without impropriety apply the remark of Herodotus, respecting one of the theories which he had heard for explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed connection with the circumfluous Ocean,—that “the man who carries up his story into the invisible world, passes out of the range of criticism.”[421]