For it is not only the whole Mohamedan region which embraced Persian civilisation, but even we Europeans have borrowed much from these wonderful people, which, partly through the channel of the ancient Greek and Byzantine culture, partly by a later contact of the Western with the Eastern countries, as, for example, in the Crusades, has naturally always reached us second hand. Iran from time immemorial was the seat of civilisation, and in the entire record of the civilisation of mankind we could in vain seek for a nation which, notwithstanding grand political revolutions, notwithstanding the copious foreign influx of the ancient spirit of its civilisation, could preserve so long and faithfully the character of its national existence as the Persian. There is a great difference between the doctrine of Zoroaster and that of the Arabian Prophet, and yet in the modern Persian almost all the features of the former character may be discovered, which the Greek historians trace out in the ancient Persian. In a hasty superficial glance this will not strike the eye so easily, for, according to outward appearance, it would be most difficult, amidst the agglomeration of tribes in the Persia of to-day, to find out the genuine Iranian. Yet a deeper insight would soon convince us of the truth of what has been said, and we should see that the Iranian has not only borrowed nothing in his customs and manner of thinking from the Semitic and Turanian elements, which for more than a thousand years have endangered his nationality, but has rather exerted over the latter a powerful influence. The cradle of the Iranian nation, as asserted by a modern ethnographer, namely, the learned Russian traveller, M. de Khanikoff, in his Memoirs, "Sur l'Ethnographie de la Perse," is the Eastern portion of modern Persia, and especially Southern Sigistan or Sistan, and Khorassan, which stretches out to the north-east. It is not only ethnography, but also history, which accords with this assertion. As Sigistan, the native place of Rustem, and other celebrated Iranian heroes of the classical age, is used as the scene of action by the narrators of fiction at this day, whenever they wish to describe something highly potent and ancient, so the old _Belkh_ in Khorassan is declared to be the original source of religion and polite education, and Merv is pointed out as the spot where Adam received from the angel the first lesson in agriculture. In a word, whatever refers to the early ages is to be met with in the East, but never in the west.