The geographical distribution of the various languages of the globe seems to render Adelung’s arguments for regarding Central Asia as the birth-place of our species eminently convincing. The languages of China and the South-east of Asia are either Monosyllabic, or Tongues that partake of that character; Languages having the same features are spoken through the long chain of islands in the Pacific as far as New Zealand. All the other Tongues of the Globe are Polysyllabic. Now if the birth-place of Man and the focus of migration was in Central Asia, on the borders of Cashmire and Tibet, this division of Languages would necessarily have followed, for it will be observed that Tibet, which is the source of the rivers of the regions to the South-east, would in that case have given inhabitants to the countries of South-eastern Asia, countries which are isolated from all others, for not only are they cut off from Europe, Africa, and Western Asia, by the system of Table-lands and its Mountains, they are also separated from Northern Asia and therefore from America by the Great Desert of Gobi or Shamo. To the Steppes of Northern Asia, and consequently to America as well as to Europe and Africa, the territory of Persia or Iran, which, as has been seen, forms the opposite slope of the system of Table-lands, is the natural route. The relations which the Parsian, the Pehlwi, and the Zend, the ancient dialects of Persia, bear to those of the surrounding countries, seem to be in a highly interesting manner confirmatory of Adelung’s views. The Parsian, which was spoken in the South of Persia in the provinces near to India, approaches so closely to the Sanscrit, the ancient language of that country, that Sir William Jones considered the Parsian to have been the parent of the Sanscrit. The Pehlwi, the language of the Parthians who occupied the centre of Persia, a territory that adjoins the Semetic countries, appears very decidedly to be a connecting link between the Semetic languages on the one hand and the Parsian and Zend and the Indo-European tongues, viewed as a class, on the other. The Zend, the dialect of ancient Media, or North Persia, is supposed to be closely allied to the Armenian. The Parsian, Pehlwi, and Zend, respectively bearing these relations to the languages of the neighbouring countries, are closely connected as sister dialects among themselves. These facts tend to show—from the summit of the Western Table-land viewed as a centre, through Persia viewed as a medium—a radiation of language from which a radiation of population may reasonably be presumed.