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2 THE ANALECTS: INTRODUCTION.
ing, perhaps for generations, over the boundless praries of
the North West, maintaining their families by pastoral oc-
cupations as they slowly forged their eastward way, a
gradually increasing host, bringing with them, along with
other arts of civilisation, a knowledge of and preference
for husbandry, which led them to settle down upon the
fertile lowlands of Shansi, and there to abandon a nomad
life for a pursuit more in keeping with their inclinations.
At least we may with reasonable assurance maintain that
they were a pastoral before an agricultural people, for
apart from the testimony of their architecture in the tent-
like shape of the national roof, there is even less disputable
evidence in the etymology of their language, sheep and
cattle figuring as root-words in early and important
characters. Such evidence we have in words like
good, _)_ excellent, _ justice, _ pastor, shepherd;and
numerous others.
Granted then that the race set out from some common
cradle of humanity, what did they find on reaching their
Canaan, the country of their adoption ? The waste howling
wilderness, through which they had wearily plodded their
homeless way, no longer stretched torbidding hands
against them, but even as the Israelite found a land which
to him, after his forty years of aimless wandering, seemed
to be flowing with milk and honey, so the pioneers of this
vast race found a land of beauty, a "Land of Flowers,"
the name with which they early designated their heritage.
Nor was it an unhabited country that they discovered,
for, even before them, numerous tribes of Hittites, Amale-
kities_ Jebusites_ and Perizzltes, in the shape of uncivilised