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Show AN OTATIONS AND ADDITIO S. 95 century before the Christian era, was a general name for the Ti, Thu-kiu or Turk , in the north and north-west of China. The southern Hiongnu overcame the Chinese, and in conjunction with them destroyed the empire of the northern Hiongnu. These btter fled to the west, and this flight seems to have given the first impulse to the migration of nations in Middle Asia. The Huns, who were long confounded with the Hiongnu (as the Uigures with the Ugure aud the Hungarians), belonged, according to Klaproth, to the Finnish race of the Ural mountains between Europe and Asia, a race which was variously mingled with Germans, Turks, and amoieds. Klaproth, Asia Polyglotta, pp. 183 and 211 ; Tableaux Historiques de l'Asie, pp. 102 and 109.) The Huns (o~~~o•) are first named by Dionysius Perigetes, a writer who was able to obtain more accurate information respecting the interior of Asia, because, as a learned man born at Charax on the Arabian Gulf, Augustus had sent him back to the East to accompany thither his adopted son Caius Agrippa. Ptolemy, a century later, writes the word (Xo1i~ot) with a strong aspiration, which, as St. Martin observes, is found again in the geographical name of Chunigard. ( 12) p. 29.-" No carved Stone." On the banks of the Orinoco near Caicara, where the forest region joins the plain, we have indeed found representations of the sun, and figures of animals, cut on the rocks : but in the Llanos themselves no traces of these rude memorials of earlier inhabitants have been discovered. It is to be regretted that we have not received any more complete and certain information respecting a monument which was sent to France to Count Maurepas, and which, according to Kalm, had been found by M. de V erandrier in the Prairies of Canada 900 miles west of Montreal, in the course of an expedition intended to reach the Pacific. (Kalm's Reise, th. iii. s. 416.) This traveller found in the middle of the plain enormous masses of stone, placed in an upright position by the hand of man, and on one of them was something which was taken to be a Tartar inscription. ( Archreologia : or Miscellaneous Tracts, published by the Society of Antiquaries of London, vol. viii. 1787, p. 304.) How is it that so important a monument has remained unexamined? |