is contained in the list of tribes given in the tenth chapter of
Genesis, which divides all mankind, as then known to the Hebrews,
into descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japhet--corresponding, roughly,
to Asia, Europe, and Africa. But in order to ascertain how the
Romans obtained the mass of information which was summarised for
them by Ptolemy in his great work, we have merely to concentrate
our attention on the remarkable process of continuous expansion
which ultimately led to the existence of the Roman Empire.

All early histories of kingdoms are practically of the same type.
A certain tract of country is divided up among a certain number
of tribes speaking a common language, and each of these tribes
ruled by a separate chieftain. One of these tribes then becomes
predominant over the rest, through the skill in war or diplomacy
of one of its chiefs, and the whole of the tract of country is thus
organised into one kingdom. Thus the history of England relates
how the kingdom of Wessex grew into predominance over the whole
of the country; that of France tells how the kings who ruled over
the Isle of France spread their rule over the rest of the land;
the history of Israel is mainly an account of how the tribe of
Judah obtained the hegemony of the rest of the tribes; and Roman
history, as its name implies, informs us how the inhabitants of
a single city grew to be the masters of the whole known world.
But their empire had been prepared for them by a long series of
similar expansions, which might be described as the successive
swallowing up of empire after empire, each becoming overgrown in
the process, till at last the series was concluded by the Romans
swallowing up the whole. It was this gradual spread of dominion
which, at each stage, increased men's knowledge of surrounding
nations, and it therefore comes within our province to roughly sum