[40] Tylor ("Primitive Culture," i. p. 44) says, "The Semitic family, which represents one of the oldest known civilizations of the world, includes Arabs, Jews, Phoenicians (?), Syrians, &c., and may have an older as well as a newer connection in North Africa. This family takes in some rude tribes, but _none which would be classed as savages_. The Aryan family has existed in Asia and Europe certainly for several thousand years, and there are well known and marked traces of early barbaric condition, which has perhaps survived with least change among secluded tribes in the valleys of the Hindu Kush and Himalaya." [_Query_, What is the nature of the evidence that they have survived, and have not degenerated?] Mr Tylor continues, "There seems, again, _no known case of any full Aryan tribe having become savage_. The gipsies and other outcasts are, no doubt, partly Aryan in blood, but _their degraded condition_ is not _savagery_. In India there are tribes Aryan by language, but whose physique is rather of indigenous type, and whose ancestry is mainly from indigenous stocks, with more or less mixture of the dominant Hindu." Compare _infra_, ch. v., and De Maistre, p. 272. In truth, it appears to us a self-evident proposition, simply because tradition has familiarised us with the belief that Europe was peopled by the descendants of Japhet, and because philology has recently demonstrated the Indo-Germanic race to include this demarcation (together with Central and Western Asia); but I think that if we exclude the testimony of tradition, we should have difficulty in establishing the point either upon the text of Gen. x. 5, or from the evidence of philology. That the race of Japhet spread themselves over the islands, and colonised the coasts of the Mediterranean, is the traditional interpretation of that text; and it receives confirmation, in the first place, in the tradition that "Japetus being the father of Prometheus, was regarded by the Greeks as the ancestor of the human race."--Smith's "Myth. Dict." We have, I think, become familiar with such transpositions as "Deucalion the son of Prometheus," and "Prometheus the son of Deucalion," &c. Certainly Prometheus (_vide_ Appendix to Chap. viii. p. 180, and Chap. x. p. 232), supposing Prometheus to be Adam,[41] would naturally stand at the head of every genealogy; but Japetus, supposing him to be identified with Japhet as the particular founder of the race (after so distinct and definite a starting-point as the Deluge), would also, in his way, have claims to be placed at the head of their genealogy; and probably about the time that he began to be called "old Japetus," and to be typical of antiquity, his claims would have been regarded as paramount, and Prometheus would have been accordingly displaced in his favour. This is conjectural, but must be taken as one link.