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"When, about the year of our Lord 48, the Huns were broken up, and fled in different divisions to the different quarters of the world, that part of them which came to Sogdiana?, & there settled under the name of Nepthalites, (4. Gibbon, 368), were no other, it is believed, than a part of those tribes of lettered men which the Huns had subdued on the Irtish two or three centuries before, and who again, upon this occasion, returned to their old country & friends, assuming the name by which those friends would the more readily recognize and receive them. The country was inhabited; yet they were received into it without opposition, as a part of the people which belonged to the ancient tribe of Napthali, and who were called Nepthalites, by corruption, for Napthalites. By this name they were distinguished from the great body of the Huns, and gained admittance amongst the inhabitants of Sogdiana?. The Chinese invaded & ruined them, after the middle of the third century of the Christian era; and at this period of adversity and distress, it has been suggested, that a part of these Nepthalites may have joined their brethren who had gone into Siberia (4 Gibbon 370, 372) "The Nepthalites who lived on the north of the Oxus?, and on the border of the Caspian Sea, so late as the period of the Chinese conquest, which was about the year of our Lord 367, must have heard of the Christian religion which had been es-