History and Geography, if we would study either thoroughly and intelligently, can never be completely dissevered. The continual influence exercised, from generation to generation, by climate, food, and necessary pursuits upon a people, combined with the influences of the political geography of the surrounding countries, the presence of strong or weak, civilised or barbarous neighbours, all these exercise the strongest pressure upon the original character, and mould the course of the history of every nation. And, therefore, to appreciate the full meaning of that history, a study of the theatre in which the action was played is of importance.

Louis the DÉbonnaire was dead; he died on June 20, 840. The bitter strife among his sons had continued to the last. The anxious indiscretion of Judith, and her determination to reserve an ample inheritance for her son Charles, caused fresh heart-burnings, revolts, and disturbances almost annually. Louis was buried in the Basilica of Saint Arnulph, beyond the walls at Frankfort.

I. The question of who were the Ligurians has occupied many, and remained obscure. Many and many years ago it occupied me, and about the year 1869 it led me to engage in a close investigation of a possible Dravidian connexion. This brought me some remarkable results, but for reasons not then known to me they led to no decision. The names of rivers in Liguria and Northern Italy responded to the Tamil names for river, water, &c., but the true cause was that such names are not Dravidian in their origin, and that the river names were not given by the Ligurians, but according to a uniform law, recognisable from Hispania or Britannia to further India, and it may be said to America.

The historian meets with greater difficulties in treating of Oriental history than in any other branch of his subject. The dawn of awakening consciousness in humanity had not yet reached broad daylight. All was still bathed in the golden rays of the rising sun, surrounded by the fantastic clouds of myths and fables. In the East the allegorical and the metaphorical have always proved serious stumbling-blocks in the path of the seeker after dry facts. We find towns personified as nations; nations reduced to mere names of places.