The races, so-called, that figured most prominently during the period beginning with authentic history and terminating in the dark ages, are first, the Semitic, which included the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Persians, Syrians, Hebrews or Jews, Saracens, Arabians, etc., indeed under the term Semitic may be included all the Orientals, except the Parthians, who were doubtless a mixed people, and those northern tribes, historically known as Scythians, afterwards the conquerors of Egypt and the progenitors of that extraordinary military autocracy known in modern times by the name of Mamelukes. The second great branch was the Pelasgian, which included the Macedonians, the Romans, the Hellenic tribes, Dorians, Thracians, etc., and of which the Romans were for nearly two thousand years the main representatives. Between these great branches of the Caucasian—for they were both doubtless, typical Caucasians, though Agassiz thinks that the Semitic constituted a separate species—there was almost constant war, from the very beginning of history to the capture of Constantinople. The Greek and Trojan war was doubtless a collision of this kind—and so were the wars of the Greeks and Persians—the conquests of Alexander, which, for a time, almost annihilated the Persian empire—the terrible life-and-death struggle of the Romans and Carthaginians, and finally the invasion and conquest of Spain by the Arabians, with their ultimate defeat by the Franks under Charles Martel. Indeed, coming down to more modern times, we find the Crusades, when nearly all Europe, in a fit of uncontrollable phrensy, precipitated itself on Asia; and in the collapse which followed, Asiatic hordes, though not exactly Semitic, again seeking to penetrate into Europe, and actually conquering the remains of the old Roman empire, in the eastern capital of which they are now firmly established. Historians are wont to magnify the results of these contests, especially the defeat of Hannibal and the overthrow of the Carthaginians by the Romans, and the defeat of the Arabians by the Franks, as of vital importance to the world and the best interests of mankind; but it is quite possible that they over-estimate these things, especially the victory of the Romans over the Carthaginians. They were both of the same species of men, both branches of the Caucasian, with the same nature, the same tendencies, and, under the same circumstances, the same beings. The Carthaginians were, for the time, highly civilized. They were the heirs of the Egyptian and Asiatic civilizations, as Rome was of that of the Greeks. They were a great commercial people, with boundless wealth, science, arts, manufactures, everything but a warlike spirit; while Rome, at the time without commerce, poor and torn by factions, was a mere military aristocracy, and the capital itself little more than a military encampment. Why, then, should the defeat of the former have been beneficial to the progress of the race, or to the