Western Asia was doubtless the cradle of the earliest civilized communities, and the source of all authentic improvement. Mount Kylas gave the term _koilon_, heaven, to the Greeks, and is probably the highest eminence on earth. Moorcroft viewed it from a tableland more than seventeen thousand feet high, and describes its sides and craggy summits of still more tremendous altitude, apparently covered thickly with snow. At its base emerges the Indus, that mighty artery of western India, on the bank of which stands Attac, a name which the great civilizing race afterward applied to the fairest realm of their culture. Standing at this fountain-head, we find increased facilities for striking out the great historico-geographical outline which marks the progress of the patriarch bands of India, Egypt, and Europe. The intimate connection between the Nilitic valley, Greece, and the lands of the Indus, is rendered yet more evident by the geographical development of the colonization of eastern Europe, in which the ingenious people of _Abu-Sin_, Abyssinians, founded the mercantile and prosperous community of Corinthus. _Cor-Indus_, that is, mouth of the Indus, carried westward, became the classical Corinth. The distance from the Indian shore was not so great but that the sail which spread for Ceylon could waft to the Red Sea, where the fleets of Tyre, of Solomon and of Hiram were to be found. The ancient Institutes of Menu expressly refer to merchants who traffic beyond sea; and, moreover, that the Hindoos were westward navigators from the earliest ages, the vestiges of their religion in the Archipelago abundantly attest. From the same lofty regions descended the _Parasoos_, that is, warriors of the Axe, to penetrate and give name to Persia, while Colchis and Armenia became as distinctly the product and proof of Indian colonization. Down this central route came the Pilgrim Fathers of the first great civilizing nations, making the whole mass of authentic geography a venerable journal of emigration on the most gigantic scale.