But we will pass to the third and most copious means of demonstration, philology. It is believed that a furious religious war, long anterior to the historic Shem, drove a large multitude of oriental inhabitants westward, and that these became the primary stratum of European humanity, afterward superseded by the Japhetic race, wherever the germs of true history took root. The names given by the Pelasgi to the chief mountains of Greece, as well as the name itself of that mysterious people, point to an emigration from India, whence a twofold stream of emigration seems to have flowed. We have alluded above to the one which, under the auspices of the semi-historic Shem, passed through Persia and northern Arabia into Egypt, and adjoined the unhistoric Ham. At a later period, whatever of excellence that transition realm developed passed into southern Greece. The other current, the grandest and most prolific of all, passed through Persia, along the Caspian sea, over mount Caucasus, and thence through Thrace direct to northern Greece. The productive tribes, at their first appearance on the horizon, enter upon the prospective stage with the elements of language, and with this fundamental power eliminated for their use, they were formed into the social compact of progressive humanity. The earliest inventors of the glorious art of writing deserve the most grateful regard. The search after them, and their several stages of discovery, tends to strengthen the view held by many, that the common chronology of history embraces too limited a period; and that hoary India, at an era anterior to human record, originated the first pictorial system and communicated it to the Chinese, whose records attribute their mode of writing to a foreign source. But the yellow races of the far East are destined to remain still in the dawn: the sun of civilization has never risen sufficiently high above them to give vital growth to any product they have either invented or received. But the old emigrants of Egypt soon reduced their pictorial language to rough hieroglyphic outlines, and then to signs yet more approximating sounds, which laid the foundation for European alphabets.