The Marquess of Hastings told the Rev. Mr Swan, chaplain of the
Cambrian, that he had found the germ of fact from which many of the most
incredible tales in ancient history had grown during his stay in India.
One instance only we would relate. A Grecian author mentions a people
who had only one leg. An embassy from the interior was conducted into
the presence of the viceroy, and he could by no persuasion prevail upon
the obsequious minister to use more than one of his legs, though he
stood during the whole of a protracted audience.

But there are other forces now drawing into the field to support the
long-neglected claims of tradition. Etymology, which professed to settle
doubts by an appeal to the elementary sounds of words, was banished from
the politer and more influential circles of English learning by a decree
as arbitrary as that pronounced on the poems of Ossian. It has come back
with a new commission and under a new title;--Ethnography is the name
given by our continental neighbours to this new science, which, in its
future developments, may bring to light some of the most obscure and
important circumstances affecting the human race, from its origin
through every succeeding epoch of its existence. The distinguishing
object of this inquiry is to identify the fortunes, migrations, and
changes of the human family as to situation, policy, religion,
agriculture, and arts, by comparing the terms supplied by or introduced
into the language of any one country with the names of the same objects
in every other. There would be no such thing as chance in nature could
we know the laws which determine every separate accident. In like manner
there will scarcely be any doubt respecting the primitive history of man
when this new science shall have accumulated and revealed all the
treasures which it may be enabled to appropriate. An agreement in the
primitive term which any object of cultivation, physical or moral, bears