Note 344 — LECTURE VI. THE TWO RELIGIONS IN HISTORY.

“It may be safely asserted that no Aryan race, while existing in anything like purity, was ever converted to Buddhism, or could permanently adopt its doctrines.”—Fergusson, Tree and Serpent Worship, p. 67. The old Turanian race, far from being savage, or even barbarous, not only laid the basis of Chinese civilisation, but seems to have been also the first civiliser of Western Asia, and the first to spread art and science along the southern coasts of Europe. The Iberian, Etruscan, Phœnician, Hittite, even Egyptian monuments, are now acknowledged to be relics of this mighty race, which must have sent horde after horde over Asia and Europe long before the historic advance westwards in the thirteenth century A.D.; its latest invasion of India may have been represented, not by Scythian ancestors of Buddha, but the Sikhs.—Conder, “Early Races of Western Asia,” Journ. Anthrop. Inst. August 1889, pp. 30-43.