[11] The Sanscrit has about one hundred and forty appellations for the "horse" (mare and colt included); and comparative philology demonstrates their primitive roots to be preserved in almost all European languages.
CHINESE.
AUTHORITIES:
The Biots, Kaeuffer, Gutzlaff, etc.
China belongs to the present and to the remotest past of the Asiatic world. The historical existence of China and her civilization are at least coeval with that of Egypt and of Assyria, perhaps older than that of the Aryas.
Some geological investigators affirm that the table-land inclosed between the northern slopes of the Himalayas, the Kuenlun, the desert of Gobi—which is said to be older than the formation of the Himalayas—the Heavenly or Blue mountains, and the Altaï, was the first land which rose from the waters, and that therefore it was the first, and perhaps the only place in the north, where man appeared. This admitted, the probability is, that from that first human family issued a race bearing to-day various appellations, as the Yellow, the Altaïc, Turanian, Scythic, Finnic, Mongolian and Tartar—which is the last general denomination adopted by science, at least for the branches occupying central Asia, and reaching to the frontiers of Europe and the descendants of the Aryas. The first immigrants to China from the Kuenlun probably followed the current of the Yellow river; and it seems that the aborigines retired before the invaders, or perhaps the new yellow settlers mixed with the primitive occupants. In the southern parts of China, in the mountains of the interior, are still found tribes of dark-colored men resembling the negroes or the Pacific islanders, and using notched characters similar to those used by the Malays.
Agriculture seems to have been the sacred occupation of these yellow-hued settlers along the banks of the Yellow river—as it was in the valley of the Nile, of the Euphrates, and on the plains of Iran. Everywhere the origin of agriculture is lost in the night of time, and Quain or Cain—that is, the kernel, the young, the generating, etc., the husbandman of the Scriptures—is many thousand years older than Abraham, the wandering and slave-holding patriarch. The oldest Chinese records show agriculture to have been the special occupation of the father of a family, of the chief of a clan, and then of the emperor of the entire nation. With his own hands he directs the plough—therefore the plough could not have been desecrated by the hands of a slave. And it was not. In the family, in the domestic as well as in the national life, slavery first dimly appears only about the thirteenth century B.C.