THE rapid increase of natural knowledge, which is the chief characteristic of our age, is effected in various ways. The main army of science moves to the conquest of new worlds slowly and surely, nor ever cedes an inch of the territory gained. But the advance is covered and facilitated by the ceaseless activity of clouds of light troops provided with a weapon-always efficient, if not always an arm of precision -the scientific imagination. It is the business of these enfants perdus of science to make raids into the realm of ignorance wherever they see, or think they see, a chance; and cheerfully to accept defeat, or it may be annihilation, as the reward of error. Unfortunately, the public, which watches the progress of the campaign, too often mistakes a dashing incursion of the Uhlans for a forward movement of the main body; fondly imagining that the strategic movement to the rear, which ocNEW SERIES.-VOL. LIII., No. 1.

eral remarks.

About a century ago, Sir William Jones pointed out the close alliance of the chief European languages with Sanskrit and its derivative dialects now spoken in India. Brilliant and laborious philologists, in long succession, enlarged and strengthened this position, until the truth that Sanskrit, Zend, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Lithua

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nian, Slavonian, German, Celtic, and so on, stand to one another in the relation of descendants from a common stock, became firmly established, and thenceforward formed part of the permanent acquisitions of science. Moreover, the term "Aryan" is very generally, if not universally, accepted as a name for the group of languages thus allied. Hence, when one speaks of "Aryan languages," no hypothetical assumptions are involved. It is a matter of fact that such languages exist, that they present certain substantial and formal relations, and that convention sanctions the name applied to them. But the close connection of these widely differentiated languages remains altogether inexplicable, unless it is admitted that they are modifications of an original relatively undifferentiated tongue; just as the intimate affinities of the Romance languages French, Italian, Spanish, and the restwould be incomprehensible if there were no Latin. The original or " primitive Aryan" tongue, thus postulated, unfortunately no longer exists. It is a hypothetical entity, which corresponds with the "primitive stock" of generic and higher groups among plants and animals; and the acknowledgment of its former existence, and of the prccess of evolution which has brought about the present state of things philologcal, is forced upon us by deductive reasoning of similar cogency to that employed about things biological.

Thus, the former existence of a body of relatively uniform dialects, which may be called primitive Aryan, may be added to the stock of definitely acquired truths. But it is obvious that, in the absence of writing or of phonographs, the existence of a language implies that of speakers. If there were primitive Aryan dialects, there must have been primitive Aryan people who used them; and these people must have resided somewhere or other on the earth's surface. Hence philology, without stepping beyond its legitimate bounds and keeping speculation within the limits of bare necessity, arrives, not only at the conceptions of Aryan languages and of a primitive Aryan language; but of a primitive Aryan people and of a primitive Aryan home, or country occupied by them. But where was this home of the Aryans? When the labors of modern philologists began, Sanskrit was the most archaic of all the Aryan languages known to them. It

appeared to present the qualifications required in the parental or primitive Aryan. Brilliant Uhlans made a charge at this opening. The scientific imagination seated the primitive Aryans in the valley of the Ganges; and showed, as in a vision, the successive columns, guided by enterprising Brahmins, which set out thence to people the regions of the western world with Greeks and Celts and Germans. But the progress of philology itself sufficed to show that this Balaclava charge, however magnificent, was not profitable warfare. The internal evidence of the Vedas proved that their composers had not reached the Ganges. On the other hand, the comparison of Zend with Sanskrit left no alternative open to the assumption that these languages were modifications of an original Indo-Iranian tongue, spoken by a people of whom the Aryans of India and those of Persia were offshoots, and who could therefore be hardly lodged elsewhere than on the frontiers of both Persia and India— that is to say, somewhere in the region which is at present known under the names of Turkestan, Afghanistan, and Kafiristan. Thus far, it can hardly be doubted that we are well within the ground of which science has taken enduring possession. But the Uhlans were not content to remain within the lines of this surely-won position. For some reason, which is not quite clear to me, they thought fit to restrict the home of the primitive Aryans to a particular part of the region in question; to lodge them amid the bleak heights of the long range of the Hindoo Koosh and on the inhospitable plateau of Pamir. From their hives in these secluded valleys and windswept wastes, successive swarns of Celts and Greco-Latins, Teutons and Slavs, were thrown off to settle, after long wanderings in distant Europe. The Hindoo-KooshPamir theory, once enunciated, gradually hardened into a sort of dogma; and there have not been wanting theorists, who laid down the routes of the successive bands of emigrants with as much confidence as if they had access to the records of the office of a primitive Aryan Quartermaster-Genera!. It is really singular to observe the deference which has been shown, and is yet sometimes shown, to a speculation which can, at best, claim to be regarded as nothing better than a somewhat risky working hypothesis.

Forty years ago, the credit of the Hin

doo-Koosh-Pamir theory had risen almost to that of an axiom. The first person to instil doubt of its value into my mind was the late Robert Gordon Latham, a man of great learning and singular originality, whose attacks upon the Hindoo-Kooshite doctrine could scarcely have failed as completely as they did, if his great powers had been bestowed upon making his books not only worthy of being read, but readable. The impression left upon my mind, at that time, by various conversations about the "Sarmatian hypothesis," which my friend wished to substitute for the HindooKoosh-Pamir speculation, was that the one and the other rested pretty much upon a like foundation of guess work. That there was no sufficient reason for planting the primitive Aryans in the Hindoo Koosh, or in Pamir, seemed plain enough; but that there was little better ground, on the evidence then adduced, for settling them in the region at present occupied by Western Russia, or Podolia, appeared to me to be not less plain. The most I thought Latham proved was, that the Aryan people of Indo-Iranian speech were just as likely to have come from Europe, as the Aryan people of Greek, or Teutonic, or Celtic speech from Asia. Of late years, La tham's views, so long neglected, or mentioned merely as an example of insular ec centricity, have been taken up and advocated with much ability in Germany as well as in this country-principally by philologists. Indeed, the glory of HindooKoosh-Pamir seems altogether to have departed. Professor Max Müller, to whom Aryan philology owes so much, will not say more now, than that he holds by the conviction that the seat of the primitive Aryans was "somewhere in Asia." Dr. Schrader sums up in favor of European Russia; while Herr Penka would have us transplant the home of the primitive Aryans from Pamir in the far east to the Scandinavian peninsula in the far west.

I must refer those who desire to acquaint themselves with the philological arguments on which these conclusions are based to the recently published works of Dr. Schrader and Canon Taylor* and to Penka's Die Herkunft der Arier, which, in spite of the strong spice of the Uhlan

* Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples. Translated by F. B. Jevons, M.A., 1890. Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, 1890.

which runs through it, I have found extremely well worth study. I do not pretend to be able to look at the Aryan question under any but the biological aspect; to which I now turn.

Any biologist who studies the history of the Aryan question, and, taking the philological facts on trust, regards it exclusively from the point of view of anthropology, will observe that, very early, the purely biological conception of "race" illegitimately mixed itself up with the ideas derived from pure philology. It is quite proper to quite proper to speak of Aryan people," because, as we have seen, the existence of the language implies that of a people who speak it; it might be equally permissible to call Latin people all those who speak Romance dialects. But, just as the application of the term Latin race" to the divers people who speak Romance languages, at the present day, is none the less absurd because it is common; so, it is quite possible, that it may be equally wrong to call the people who spoke the primitive Aryan dialects and inhabited the primitive home, the Aryan race. Aryan" is properly a term of classification used in philology. "Race"

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is the name of a sub-division of one of those groups of living things which are called species" in the techuical language of Zoology and Botany; and the term connotes the possession of characters distinct from those of the other members of the species, which have a strong tendency to appear in the progeny of all members of the races. Such race characters may be either bodily or mental, though in practice, the latter, as less easy of observation and definition, can rarely be taken into account. Language is rooted half in the bodily and half in the mental nature of man. The vocal sounds which form the raw materials of language could not be produced without a peculiar conformation of the organs of speech; the enunciation of duly accented syllables would be impos sible without the nicest co-ordination of the action of the muscles which move these organs; and such co-ordination depends on the mechanism of certain portions of the nervous system. It is therefore conceivable that the structure of this highly complex speaking apparatus should determine a man's linguistic potentiality; that is to say, should enable him to use a

language of one class and not of another. It is further conceivable that a particular linguistic potentiality should be inherited and become as good a race mark as any other. As a matter of fact, it is not proven that the linguistic potentialities of all men are the same. It is affirmed, for example, that, in the United States, the enunciation and the timbre of the voice of an American-born negro, however thoroughly he may have learned English, can be readily distinguished from that of a white man. But, even admitting that differences may obtain among the various races of men, to this extent, I do not think that there is any good ground for the supposition that an infant of any race would be unable to learn, and to use with ease, the language of any other race of men among whom it might be brought up. History abundantly proves the transmission of languages from some races to others; and there is no evidence, that I know of, to show that any race is incapable of substituting a foreign idiom for its native tongue.

From these considerations it follows that community of language is no proof of unity of race, is not even presumptive evidence of racial identity. * All that it does prove is that, as some time or other, free and prolonged intercourse has taken place between the speakers of the same language. Philology, therefore, while it may have a perfect right to postulate the existence of a primitive Aryan" people," has no business to substitute "race" for " people. The speakers of primitive Aryan may have been a mixture of two or more races, just as are the speakers of English and of French, at the present time.

The older philological ethnologists felt

* Canon Taylor (Origin of the Aryans, p. 31) states that Cuno was the first to insist on what is now looked on as an axiom in ethnology-that race is not co-extensive with language," in a work published in 1871. I may be permitted to quote a passage from a lecture delivered on the 9th of January, 1870, which brought me into a great deal of trouble. Physical, mental, and moral peculiarities go with blood and not with language. In the United States the negroes have spoken English for generations; but no one on that ground would call them Englishmen, or expect them to differ physically, mentally, or morally from other negroes."-Pall Mall Gazelle, Jan. 10, 1870. But the "axiom in ethnology" had been implied, if not ennnciated, before my time; for example, by Ecker in 1865.

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the difficulty which arose out of their identification of linguistic with racial affinity, but were not dismayed by it. Strong in the prestige of their great discovery of the unity of the Aryan tongues, they were quite prepared to make the philological and the biological categories fit, by the exercise of a little pressure on that about which they knew less. their judgment was often unconsciously warped by strong monogenistic proclivities, which at bottom, however respectable and philanthropic their origin, had nothing to do with science. So the patent fact that inen of Aryan speech presented widely diverse racial characters was explained away by maintaining that the physical differentiation was post-Aryan; to put it broadly, that the Aryans in Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir were truly of one race; but that, while one colony, subjected to the sweltering heat of the Gangetic plains, had fined down and darkened into the Bengalee, another had bleached and shot up, under the cool and misty skies of the north, into the semblance of Pomeranian Grenadiers; or of blueeyed, fair-skinned, six-foot Scotch Highlanders. I do not know that any of the Uhlands who fought so vigorously under this flag are left now. I doubt if any one is prepared to say that he believes that the influence of external conditions, alone, accounts for the wide physical differences between Englishmen and Bengalese. So far as India is concerned, the internal evidence of the old literature sufficiently proves that the Aryan invaders were

white" men. It is hardly to be doubted that they intermixed with the dark Dravidian aborigines; and that the high-caste Hindoos are what they are in virtue of the Aryan blood which they have inherited,*

So

* I am unable to discover good grounds for the severity of the criticism, in the name of "the anthropologists,' "with which Professor Max Müller's assertion that the same blood runs in the veins of English soldiers" as in the veins of the dark Bengalese," and that there is a legitimate relationship between Hindoo, Greek, and Teuton,' " has been visited. far as I know anything about anthropology, I should say that these statements may be correct literally, and probably are so substanially. I do not know of any good reason for the physical differences between a high-caste Hindoo and a Dravidian, except the Aryan blood in the veins of the former; and the strength of the infusion is probably quite as great in some Hindoos as in some English soldiers.