Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/182

170 period history loses sight of the ten tribes as a distinct people. Prideaux supposes they were totally lost and absorbed in the nations among whom they settled; but imagination has loved to follow them into remote and inaccessible regions, where it is supposed they still await the restoration of the twelve tribes to their native land; or it has traced the Jewish features, language, and religion in different tribes, particularly in the Afghans of India, and, in a still wilder spirit of romance, in the (aboriginal) Americans." (Vol. i. p. 247.)

The American missionary Grant, in his 'Nestorians, or the Lost Tribes,' to which we may afterwards revert, says, "We shall not be expected to attempt a refutation of these various theories, none of which have been supported by sufficient evidence to produce anything like a general conviction in their favour. The ten tribes of Israel are still as really the lost tribes as they ever have been." (P. 105.)

Our last quotation on this point shall be from the Rev. C. Forster's imaginative work, 'The One Primæval Language,' in which he gives also a 'New Key for the Recovery of the Lost Ten Tribes,' prefacing it by observing, "The most interesting problem in the history of the world, as yet unsolved, unquestionably is the national existence and local habitation of the lost ten tribes of Israel. The fact of their existence indeed stands certified by the sure word of prophecy; but the place or places of their banishment have been so long buried in the womb of time, that all efforts heretofore have seemed labour in vain to draw them from their living tomb." (Vol. iii. p. 238.)

These references, which might easily be extended to the proportions of a volume, will suffice to show how general has been the belief of the ten tribes having become lost, and how varied and fanciful have been the theories held respecting them. For the supposition of such a loss, and the theories advanced for their discovery, the whole groundwork and authority has been a passage in the Apocryphal work named Esdras, chapter 13 of the 2nd book, in which the writer says he "dreamed a dream," part of which was interpreted to him as follows: "And whereas thou sawest that he gathered another peaceable multitude unto him; those are the ten tribes which were carried away prisoners out of their own land In the time of Osea the king, whom Salmanassar of Assyria led away captive, and he carried them over the waters, and so came they into another land. But they took this counsel among themselves, that they would leave the multitude of the heathen, and go forth into a further country where never mankind dwelt; that they might