The Aryan Homestead

PERHAPS no conclusion of comparative philology has received such unanimous indorsement and been regarded as so incontestable as that which designates the tablelands of Central Asia as the cradle of the Aryan race. Indeed, this theory has acquired an almost axiomatic validity; already it forms a part of the treasured and traditional learning of the encyclopædias, whence it perco-

lates into the popular lecture and newspaper editorial, and now passes unchallenged into elementary text-books of geography, history, ethnology, and literature. Thus it is impressed upon the mind of every schoolboy, who is taught to accept it as unreservedly as the statement that the Pilgrim Fathers came from England and landed on Plymouth Rock. Even after the Hebrew story of the origin of the earth and of man had ceased to be recognized by science as adequate cosmology and ethnology, there still remained a strong prepossession in favor of Asia as the birthplace of the human race. Vague traditions of an Oriental descent, current among many European nations, seemed to confirm this opinion. Of special significance was the saga of the wanderings of Odin, who, with the twelve Asen, came from Asia and founded the sacred Asgard. The Saxons, according to their earliest chronicler, were descended from the Macedonian warriors, who subverted the Persian empire, and carried the victorious standards of Alexander to the banks of the Indus; the Franks boasted of their Trojan lineage; the Bavarians cherished reminiscences of Armenia, where their forefathers had seen the remains of Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat, and beyond which a residue of Germanspeaking kinsmen was still supposed to dwell ; and the Suabians never forgot that their ancestors came over the sea from the region of the rising sun. But all these notions are only the fusty inventions of mediæval monks, forming a curious and incongruous medley of biblical and classical legends, out of which it is impossible to winnow the smallest grain of historical truth, or win the slightest kernel of ancient and really popular tradition.

“ Asia,” says Adelung, in his Mithridates, “ has been regarded from time immemorial as that part of the world in which the human race originated and was first educated, and whence it diffused itself over the rest of the earth.” “ Europe,” he adds, “ is only a promontory of Asia, and is indebted to the latter for its population.” Kâshmîr he held to have been the seat of Paradise. Doubtless, the oldest civilizations and the earliest empires were Asiatic; doubtless, too, Europe has borrowed from the East many elements of social refinement and intellectual culture : but these facts furnish no ground whatever for the inference that the European nations are of Oriental origin.

In the infancy of comparative philology, when Sanskrit was assumed to be the mother of all Aryan languages, the question of the origin of the peoples speaking these languages was easily and satisfactorily settled. Nothing could be more natural or more legitimate than to suppose that the children came from the land in which the parent was still living. This is one of the considerations which led Mr. Curzon to conclude that the Indo-Aryans are autochthones, and that from India, as a centre, an Aryan population was gradually distributed over all Europe. Very soon, however, the maternal claims of Sanskrit were set aside, and she was made to take her proper place as an elder sister. Also, the Indo-Aryans were no longer regarded as aborigines of the country they now inhabit and are known to have inhabited as early as the Vedic age, but their ancestors were seen through the philologist’s telescope (an instrument which does for events in time what ordinary optic tubes do for objects in space), long before the dawn of history, migrating over the passes and across the snowfields of the Himâlaya, descending into the sunny plains, subduing the inferior natives, and settling in the fertile valleys of the seven rivers.

In view of the positiveness with which the fact of such a great prehistoric movement is affirmed, and die topographical precision with which it has been traced, it is strange that the memorials of the people whose ancestors are supposed to have effected it should not furnish the faintest evidence that any event of this kind ever occurred. Neither in the poetry, nor mythology, nor traditions, nor sacred legends, of the Indo-Aryans do we find a single reminiscence of a trans-Himalayan origin, or any distinct allusion to a former residence outside of India. They believed themselves to be indigenous to the region drained by the Indus and its tributaries, and coextensive with the Panjâb. The five mesopotamias, or interfluvial districts, formed by these streams were occupied by independent Aryan tribes, and it is highly probable that the five nations or settlements of which the authors of the Vedic hymns often make mention, and the scholiasts are unable to give any consistent or satisfactory explanation, refer to such communities or clans. Brahmanical commentators, naturally enough, interpreted these five tribal divisions as denoting the four castes and the pariahs, in order to give the sanction of remote antiquity to their priestly prerogatives. But there is no ground whatever for this assumption; the ethnographer might as well attempt to discover in them a divine revelation anticipating and confirming Blumenbach’s classification of mankind into five races.

The distinguished Sanskritist, Dr. John Muir, suggests that, “ in the references made to the Uttara (or northern) Kurus in the Indian books, there may be some reminiscence of an early connection with the countries to the north of the Himâlaya.” If this supposition be well founded, we should justly expect to find the most distinct and definite allusions to this people, and the clearest traces of such hypothetical prehistoric connection, in the oldest Indo-Aryan records and traditions. In the Rig-Veda, however, no mention is made of these Kurus, and no peculiar sacredness is attached to the north. It is in the ritualistic and legendary literature of a later period that the northern Kurus are first spoken of as dwellers beyond the Himâlaya. All these vague and ambiguous allusions to a northern wonder-land can be easily explained without assuming it to have been the primitive home of the Indo-Aryans. The long range of mountain peaks, forming a bright and impassable barrier of snow and ice, like the palisades and parapets of the palaces of the gods, would naturally excite the imagination of a simple people, and originate marvelous stories of a region of inconceivable splendor and perpetual delight, inaccessible to mortals. This impression would be strengthened by the observation that the terrific thunderstorms which are peculiar to that country, and are portrayed by the poets as the battles of the gods, gather around the mountain summits, and that thence, too, flow the rivers, whose stolen waters the heroic Indra wrests from the envious clutch of the drought demon, and sets free to refresh and fertilize the arid plains.

Lassen published a learned essay to prove the existence of the Uttara Kurus as a real people. That the old Brahmans knew better is evident from a characteristic incident related in the Aitareya Brâhmana. It is there stated that Atyarâti, having been anointed king by Sâtyahavya, was enabled, by virtue of the horse sacrifice, to subdue the whole earth. Sâtyahavya then demanded fit recompense for his sacerdotal services ; but Atyarâti replied, “ When I have conquered the Uttara Kurus, then shalt thou become lord of the earth, and I will be the leader of thy armies.” The indignant priest exclaimed, “ That is the realm of the gods, which no man can conquer; thou hast thought to defraud me.” Thereupon he deprived the sovereign of his power and prestige, and caused him to be defeated and slain. Then comes the moral of the story; namely, that no king should try to trick a priest, unless he wishes to lose his kingdom and his life. The wily Brahman was not disposed to be put off with the prospect of taking tithes of the Uttara Kurus, or to accept a lien on Utopia in payment of his present dues.

The account of the deluge, contained in the Satapatha Brâhmana, has also been adduced in support of the theory that the Indo-Aryans, as descendants of Manu, had their origin in a country north of the Himâlaya. Manu, it is said, having embarked on the ship and attached his cable to the horn of the Brahmâ-fish, sped by this means beyond the northern mountain. Thus the IndoAryans are represented in the person of Manu, their father and federal head, as being forced out of their primeval abode by a cataclysm, and crossing the Himâlaya in a ship, — an hypothesis too absurd to be entertained for a moment.

From the occasional use of hima (winter), in the Rig-Veda, in the sense of year, it has been inferred that the Indo-Aryans once lived in a colder climate than that of Northern India. A closer examination of the passages in which the word occurs proves that too much stress has been laid upon this single circumstance, and that conclusions have been drawn from it and theories built upon it far more extensive and imposing than such a scant and shaky basis would justify or be able to sustain. Hima, in this signification, is used only about a dozen times in the Rig-Veda, and always in the same set phrase, śatam himah, or śatahimah, a hundred winters, for which period the singer entreats the gods that his life may be prolonged, and that he may be blessed with health and wealth and vigorous sons.

On the other hand, the word śarad (autumn) is employed more than thirty times in the Rig-Veda to denote “year,” not in any stereotyped form of speech, but in a great variety of connections ; nor is there the slightest ground for the assertion that this term is a later usage, introduced after the Indo-Aryans had settled in a more temperate region. On the contrary, the fact that the same relation holds between the corresponding terms in the Avesta, where śaredha is of much more frequent occurrence than zima as a poetical or synecdochical synonym of yâre, would indicate that both words had acquired this meaning before the separation of the Indic and Iranic scions of the Aryan stock.

It is curious to note what momentous inferences scholars will often draw from meagre premises, in the absence of the facts requisite to establish a preconceived theory. Thus Wilson asserts that to live a hundred winters is “ a boon not likely to have been desired by the natives of a warm climate.” Why not ? It would certainly be regarded as a boon in a warm rather than in a cold climate. In a country like Northern India, winter is the most delightful and desirable season of the year, and consequently the season with which the chief pleasures and intensest love of life would be most naturally associated, and in which man’s vigor and vitality would be greatest and his energies and activities find their fullest scope. For a like reason, śarad, the time of maturing fruits and harvests, would not only strengthen the desire to live, but would also be intimately connected with the means of renewing and prolonging life.

At the risk of being tedious and seeming trivial, I have summarized all the indications and allusions which Indian literature and tradition furnish in favor of the trans-Himalayan origin of IndoAryans. There is absolutely nothing more to be drawn from these sources, so far as they have hitherto been discovered and disclosed. The reader will thus perceive how slight and flimsy are the threads by which it has been attempted to trace the Indo-Aryans from their present abode to an hypothetical homestead in a high northern latitude. If he seeks to follow them up, he will find them floating in the air, like the gossamer, which popular superstition believes to be filaments of the Madonna’s shroud that caught on the bushes as she ascended into heaven, and remain there, for all time, as conclusive proof of her assumption. The evidence in each case possesses much of the same character and cogency.

On the other hand, the arguments adduced in support of the theory that the Indo-Aryans are aborigines of India are equally indecisive. Âryâvarta (the circuit of the Aryans) is geographically defined in the code of Manu as extending from sea to sea and comprising all Northern India. Within this province, between the rivers Sarasvati and Drishadvati, lies Brahmâvarta. A peculiar sanctity was attached to this region, owing to the fact that here Brahmanism was first organized and fully developed. It was revered as a “ holy land,” because it was the birthplace and stronghold of Indian sacerdotalism ; not, as Mr. Curzon maintains, because it was the cradle of the Aryan race. One might as well infer that Christ and his apostles were born on the banks of the Tiber, because Rome is called the Holy See and has long been revered as the centre of Christendom. Indeed, the first appearance of the Indo-Aryans on the stage of history is as invaders of the land which afterwards became so sacred to them ; they entered it and held it as a fair-complexioned race of conquerors, advancing from the northwest to the southeast and subjugating a dark-hued native population.

Again, Mr. Curzon asserts that the Aryans of Europe came from India at a time when the race “ had attained an advanced state of civilization ; when the Vedas had been composed, and a national system of religion established; when the Brahmanical hierarchy had been formed, the Aryan tongue cultivated, and codes of laws compiled.” To say nothing of the fact that the European Aryans were already on the shores of the Baltic and the German Ocean when these events took place in India, it is impossible that a people, after having made so great acquisitions of intellectual culture and social refinement, and developed so highly organized civil and political institutions, should have not only lost them all by emigration, but have also passed through such severe crises and terrible experiences without preserving the least vestige or faintest recollection of their trials and adventures. If the Vedas had been composed before the separation, some fragments of them, at least, would have lingered in the memory of the European Aryans, especially as these hymns were handed down for centuries, in India, by oral transmissions from generation to generation. If an institution so ineradicably tough and tenacious of life as Brahmanism had then grown up, some shoot of this hierarchical banyan would have taken root in European soil. One thing is certain : wherever may have been the original home of the Aryans, their supposed prehistoric migrations must have occurred when they were in a low, barbarous state, incapable of keeping records, or even of retaining impressions and communicating traditions of tribal events. For this reason, the descendants of such emigrant tribes would naturally regard themselves as indigenous to the country in which, so far as they remember, they have always dwelt, and in which they first came to what might be called their historical consciousness. Indeed, the belief in an autochthonous origin is common to all branches of the Aryan family except the Irano-Aryans, who have woven into their sacred books a vague legend of the early migrations of their ancestors.

In the first chapter of the Vendidâd we are told that Ahuramazda created a delightful spot, called Airyana-Vaêjô, but that the death-dealing Angro-Mainyush spoiled this paradise by the counter-creation of winter. The good spirit then provided another dwelling-place for his worshipers, but the alert adversary again thwarted his beneficent designs by means of pestilence and murrain. Thus the contest between these rival powers was carried on, until sixteen countries had been successively created and destroyed. Nearly thirty years ago, this portion of the Vendidâd was translated and annotated by Haug, and incorporated by Bunsen in the third volume of his Egypt’s Place in Universal History. Both scholars accepted it as an historical document containing an authentic account of the migrations of the primitive Aryans, and seem to have entertained no suspicion of its real character as a piece of mythical cosmology. Nine of the places enumerated have been identified with actual countries, but even in these cases we have only a later application of the names of heavenly regions to earthly cities or districts, as when the “ four-cornered Varena ” (that is, Varuna, Ovʾρavóó embracing the four points of the compass) is interpreted by the Pahlavi translator as referring to Kîrmân with its four gates, and is supposed to survive in the modern village Verek. Besides, there is no orderly sequence in the positions of these countries, such as would indicate a route of any kind. They lie scattered about in opposite directions, as if the sole aim of Ahuramazda had been to perplex and outwit Angro-Mainyush and put him off the track by springing hither and thither in the most eccentric manner, and leading the people to and fro in wearisome and vexatious zigzags.

Even admitting that this legend may have a certain historical value, it would be confined to the movements of the Iranians, and would not affect the question of the original home of the Aryan family. One might as well attempt to trace the prehistoric migrations of the Semitic race in the wanderings of Abraham from Haran to Machpelah. The only fact educible from this mass of tradition is that the primeval Iranians suffered from a sudden and excessive change of climate. Snow and ice covered the fruitful fields ; avalanches filled up the pleasant valleys ; the “ good pasturage ” was ruined, and the herds perished. Every people look back to a golden age in the remotest past. The Iranians, like the Hebrews, loved to picture to themselves their primitive home as an Eden, a seat of unalloyed bliss. They therefore characterized it, in its original state, as an excellent creation, the first and best of all lands. But it was not easy to harmonize this ideal conception with the tradition of a country so frigid and inhospitable as to be quite uninhabitable,and from which their ancestors were forced to emigrate with the selectest of their kine, and grains, and their “red, blazing fires.” The only means of explaining this contradiction was by the intervention of a diabolus ex machina in the person of AngroMainyush, who, in his malevolence, sent frost and snow, the calamity of winter, represented as the monstrous meteorological serpent Azhi, into this realm of perfect bliss, and thus succeeded in driving mankind out of the happy abode. Possibly, in this record, we may have a reminiscence of the cosmical fact of the diminution of the earth’s temperature, although this cooling process is described mythologically, rather than geologically, by being attributed to diabolical agencies. But even if this hypothesis were correct, it would furnish no clue to the geographical position of the devastated paradise ; since at one time, vines and tropical flowers flourished in the latitude of Greenland, and at a later period glaciers overspread the plains of Southern Europe. Thus the imagination is given a wide range in which to locate the scene of such a catastrophe.

In extreme northern countries there are only two seasons, a period of light and a period of darkness, the changes from one to the other being so abrupt and so transient as to be unimportant and scarcely noteworthy. As one proceeds southward, the seasons acquire a more distinct and manifold character, and there is a tendency to recognize a greater number of them by making minuter divisions of the year. Thus Tacitus was surprised to find that the Germans had names for winter, spring, and summer, but none for autumn, of which season they had no conception. This fact has also been seized upon and applied to solve the problem under discussion. In the Avesta, says a recent writer, mention is made of only two seasons, summer and winter; in the oldest parts of the Rig-Veda three are spoken of, autumn, winter, and spring; at a later period, the Indian year comprises six seasons, spring, summer, raintime, autumn, winter, and frost-time. As a general statement this is doubtless correct, but it will not serve as a foundation upon which to build scientific theories. It is quite probable that the Indo-Aryans of the Veda designated the seasons with greater exactness than the Irano-Aryans of the Avesta; but there is no positive proof of it. In the oldest hymns of the Rig-Veda there is no mention of the seasons whatever. Śarad occurs frequently, but always in the sense of year, thus corresponding precisely to śaredha in the Avesta. It is only in the later hymns of the tenth book that hemanta is used once, grîshma once, and vasanta twice, in such a manner as to imply seasons; and at that time the Indo - Aryans had already reached the banks of the Ganges and the foot of the Vindhya mountains. Indeed, nicety in discriminating and denominating the seasons is quite as much a matter of culture as of climate; otherwise there is no reason why the Germans of to-day should have autumn in their calendar. It is evident that all appeals to such sources as means of determining the geographical position of the land in which the primitive Aryans dwelt must be futile. Troubadours, and minnesingers, and mediæval minstrels in general celebrate the beauties and pleasures of spring, and ignore every other season. The modern reader of their verses wearies of opening buds and vernal bloom and fresh green, and longs for a leafless tree or a brown and barren field. But who would adduce this partial appreciation of nature as proof that summer, autumn, and winter were at that time unnamed and unknown ? The poet himself might justly protest against the pressure thus put upon him by the philologist, and exclaim with Uncle Remus, “ Now, den, honey, you ’re crowdin’ me.”

Another point regarded as showing “ incontestably ” that the Indo-Aryans came from Central Asia is the resemblance between Rasâ in the Rig-Veda and Rañha in the Avesta, and the assumption that the latter is only a different name for the Yaxartes. Both words are derived from verbal roots signifying “ to roar,” and meant originally any rushing and resounding water-course. Afterwards they seem to have been applied exclusively to certain mythical streams, which were supposed to flow round the earth, but which it is impossible to identify with the Oxus or the Yaxartes, or any other real river. To infer from these names that the Indo-Aryans were emigrants from Bactria would be hardly less absurd than to compare the Tamasâ (a tributary of the Ganges) with the Thames, and thus trace them to the British Isles.

In his edition of Tacitus’ Germania, published in 1851, and in a work on The Native Races of the Russian Empire, Mr. Latham first suggested that the primitive home of the Aryan family was probably between the Danube and the Dneiper, rather than on the banks of the Oxus and the Yaxartes. The botanist or zoölogist, he said, who should find a single species extending over a comparatively small area of Asia, but belonging to a genus which covered two thirds of Europe, would pronounce the genus to be European. There is no reason, he added, why the logic of the philologist, in treating of languages, should differ from that of the naturalist, in treating of flora anti fauna. In his Elements of Comparative Philology, Mr. Latham reiterated this statement, and declared that inasmuch as history is confessedly silent concerning the original seat of the Aryans, we can only consider a priori presumptions; and since these are in favor of deducing the smaller class or species from the area of the larger class or genus, the origin of the Aryans is to be sought in Europe, on the eastern or southeastern borders of Lithuania.

This view, so far as it was noticed at all, was generally ridiculed by British and Continental philologists. Victor Hehn, of Berlin, characterized it as “ a conceit which popped into the head of an original in England, the land of eccentricities ; ” and the same writer had the assurance to denounce Theodore Benfey, of Göttingen, and Lazarus Geiger, of Frankfort, who accepted the theory in its essential features, as a “ whimsical professor ” and a “ clever dilettante.'’ But the honest opinion of an earnest scholar is not easily hooted and howled out of existence, nor can it be buried out of sight by heaping on it any amount of epithetic abuse. With the progress of philology, and especially of ethnology, the Asiatic hypothesis was found to be more and more inadequate to explain the constantly accumulating mass of facts. The geological evidence of the existence of man in Europe as early as the post-tertiary period would indicate a possibility that its later population was also indigenous, instead of being immigrants from Asia. We know that, in consequence of great physical changes, the river-drift man was superseded by the cave man ; and why might not the Iberian and the Aryan have sprung up on the same soil, as products of environments favorable to the evolution of a higher human type ? There is no proof that any of these races were exotic, although, some of them may have extended from Siberia to Spain, wandering northward or retreating southward in search of a suitable habitat, as the climate grew warmer or colder. If Europe has been the dwelling-place of man for two thousand centuries, why should we be forced to go to Asia for the origin of the last and noblest of the race ?

Both branches of the Asiatic Aryans emerge from prehistoric obscurity as aliens in the lands they inhabit. The oldest legends of the Iranians represent them as having wandered far from their ancestral seat into un-Aryan countries, and in the Rig-Veda the authors of these hymns appear as foreign invaders and conquerors in conflict with Dasyus, a lower race of native barbarians, doomed to be exterminated or enslaved.

Our earliest tidings of the European Aryans are of much more recent date ; we have no information concerning their place of abode or state of culture, at the time when the Avesta and the Veda were composed. However, in the first authentic accounts of them that have been preserved, they appear, not merely in their national traditions, but also in the actual conditions of their life, as aboriginal possessors of the soil, an show every evidence of having occupied it from time immemorial. During the three centuries that elapsed from the voyages of Pytheas to the campaigns of Cæsar, the Germans do not seem to have changed their geographical position to any considerable extent. They believed themselves to be “ earth-born,” and Tacitus indorsed this opinion, deeming it incredible that any one should go to such a wretched country, or even remain there, unless it were his fatherland. We do not see them entering Europe as invaders and displacing a previous population, as Indo-Aryans displaced Dasyus and Europeans displaced the red men of America. They appear to have superseded other peoples in the struggle for existence, by the operation of the natural law of development and the principle of the survival of the fittest working through thousands of years, as the horse superseded the hipparion and the ox supplanted the urus. The Basks retreated into the Pyrenees and the Finns and Lapps into the frigid fastnesses of the north before the same kind of forces that drove the ibex and the chamois from the plains into the high Alps, and compelled the reindeer and the polar bear to find a home among arctic snows and ice-floes. It was not because they succumbed in combats with foes of superior strength, coming from another continent, that the palæolithic fauna became extinct or retired to a more congenial habitat, but because the agencies and conditions which produced and fostered the neolithic fauna proved fatal to them. It was in consequence of such a revolution that the cave men withdrew from France to Greenland, where they probably still survive as Eskimos. Changes of a less violent character, aided by lucky accidents in the chances of life, may have favored the indigenous development of the fair-skinned, broad-headed, large-framed Aryan at the expense of the olive-colored, narrow-headed, smallboned Iberian, without the necessity of assuming that the dominant race were immigrants from Asia.

The contents of the most ancient sepulchral mounds in Europe are Aryan remains, and tend to confirm the theory of the European origin of the Aryan race. The pile-dwellings of the Swiss lakes and of the morasses of Lombardy also indicate a state of civilization corresponding essentially to that of the primitive Aryans as reconstructed by linguistic palæontology. Their domestic animals and cultivated plants, food, clothing, weapons of chase and of war, and general mode of life were much the same. The transition from the stone age to the bronze age is clearly traceable in the refuse of these habitations, both in Switzerland and in the basin of the Po. But the tin necessary for the production of bronze could have been procured only in Europe, and was obtained probably from the mines of Cornwall.

The only metal with which the primitive Aryans seem to have been familiar was copper in its crude form. There is no evidence that they smelted or smithed it, or worked it up into utensils of any kind. It was used for ornament on account of its color, and its worth in this respect made it available as a circulating medium for commercial transactions. It is well known that at a much later period, when the art of manufacturing metals had attained considerable perfection, the treasures of heroes and princes consisted of personal ornaments, rings, bracelets, and gold bands, as described in Beowulf and the Edda. But the earliest standard of value was a cow, and this continued to be the most common one even in the time of Homer ; among the Brahmans of to-day the compensation for the performance of a sacrifice or other religious rite is still computed in kine, although it may be paid in coin. Survivals of this rude and clumsy method of barter are found in all languages. The oldest Roman laws imposed fines and penalties in cattle and sheep. Afterwards, a lump of copper (aes rude) became the measure of values in traffic ; hence our word “estimate,” aes-timare, to determine the worth of anything in copper. Finally, the aes rude was superseded by the aes signatum, a rough-wrought coin of fixed fineness and weight, upon which was stamped the figure of a cow, a sheep, or a pig, destined to be succeeded, in due time, by the emblem of a tribe, the escutcheon of a city, or the head of an emperor. It is noteworthy, too, that pecunia (from pecus, a herd), although standing for property in general, should have always retained the specific signification of copper currency, in distinction from aurum and argentum. Thus is not only the evolution of money from cattle to coin clearly traceable in Roman legislation, but, what is more pertinent to my present purposes, the Latin aes and the Gothic aiz have preserved the original meaning of copper, whereas ayas in the Rig-Veda and ayañh in the Avesta are used simply for metal, and specially for iron. These facts, so far as they may have any evidential force, would seem to indicate the greater primitiveness of Europeo-Aryan civilization.

In a paper read before the St. Gall Society of Natural History, Franz Misteli states that since, “ on linguistic grounds, the home of the Aryans must be placed north of the Himâlaya, on the confines of India and Persia, therefore the Indo-Germans must have been acquainted with the tiger, inasmuch as the habitat of this beast of prey extends over these regions.” A more perfect specimen of circulus in demonstrando it would be difficult to discover or construct. There are no “linguistic grounds” necessitating such a location of the Aryan home ; and decidedly opposed to it is the absolute and radically irremediable divergence in the names for both tiger and lion in the Aryan languages of Asia and those of Europe. The only logical inference from the prehistoric existence of these animals in those regions would be that the home of the Aryans must be sought elsewhere.

A comparison of the names of many forest trees, particularly the beech, the birch, and the oak, seems to point to their habitat in Northern and Central Europe as the probable home of the European Aryans. Here, too, have always lived, and still live, the purest representatives of the blue-eyed, flaxenhaired, ruddy-complexioned Aryan type, from which the Asiatic Aryans show the widest deviation. This would hardly be the case if the race had its origin in Asia. In climate and general conformation, the region lying between the Baltic and the Black Sea was better fitted for the abode and development of a primitive people than the high table-

lauds of Asia. The geographical positions of the various branches of the Aryan family in historical times can be most easily accounted for by assuming this region as their Airyana-Vaêjô, or prehistoric point of departure. Also, the earliest movements of Aryan peoples of which we have any record proceeded from this quarter towards the east and southeast: such were the migrations of the Phrygians, Thracians, Armenians, and the tribes to which Greece owed its Hellenic population. It was only at a later period, in consequence of the regression of the Kelts, that the Germans crossed the Rhine, the Slavs followed in their wake, and the westward “ wandering of the nations ” began. Professor Löher’s assertion that primitive men would instinctively go towards the rising sun, “to see where it comes from,” is too subjective and fanciful to deserve any consideration. Solar attraction, if it affected them at all, would naturally lead them to migrate with the course of the sun rather than in opposition to it. They would be quite as curious to see where it went to as where it came from. It has been observed that, owing to the unequal size and energy of the lobes of the brain, no person can walk a straight line in the dark or with closed eyes, but will invariably turn a little to the right. This peculiarity has suggested to an ingenious mind a physiological theory to account for the presence of Aryans in the Balkan Peninsula and on the Danube. Assuming that they were originally in Central Asia, and wished to move southward in search of a warmer climate, without a compass to guide them, it is natural to suppose that they would deviate constantly to the right, and thus actually go southwestward. It would be difficult to decide which of these two great discoveries, migration through solar attraction or through cerebral action, should take the prize as the more marvelous specimen of mare’s-nest.

Professor Löher, whose paper on this subject, read before the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, is chiefly an archæological oratio pro domo, regards the important part which the dragon plays in old German sagas as a tradition of prehistoric combats of men with enormous reptiles, and finds in these legends a proof that the Aryans at that time inhabited the morassy districts of Germany, in which these crocodilian creatures lived. The dragon, however, is a monster of so protean mien as hardly to be serviceable as the basis of a scientific theory. Like the green serpent on which the Iranian hero, Kereśâśpa, built a fire to cook his dinner, mistaking it for a grassy bank, it may suddenly slip from under the steaming pot and spill the savory porridge.¹ A dragon may represent extreme cold or torrid heat; the cloud that brings crushing masses of snow, as in the Vendidâd, or the cloud that imprisons the rain and produces drought, as in the Veda. It may be, like Grendel, the fiend of the fens, a personification of malaria, “ that dark pest of men ” and “ great bestrider of the mark,” which seized the thanes while asleep and carried them off, until Beowulf slew the “ venomous guest ” and destroyed the loathsome brood by “ purifying the waters of the moors ; ” or it may be, as Lippert suggests, the spirit of an ancient hero, guarding the treasures deposited in his tomb against degenerate and impecunious descendants, who would fain replenish their coffers by robbing the barrow of its hoard. All these theories are possible. Indeed, there is nothing dire that the dragon may not symbolize, nothing dreadful to encounter that has not been called by this name, from a megalosaurus to a mother-in-law.

Such are a few of the considerations that render the Asiatic origin of the Aryans quite questionable, and point to Europe as the more probable home of the race. This theory also finds confirmation in the very marked and apparently prehistoric influence of EuropeoAryan upon Finnic languages, whereas the traces of Semitic elements in the former are extremely slight, being confined to a few words, which may have been easily introduced through later commercial intercourse.

It must be remembered, however, that in the present state of our knowledge the whole discussion of this subject must be limited to a simple balancing of pros and cons, and a cautious statement of probabilities. We have to do with mere hypotheses, about which it is interesting to speculate, but absurd to dogmatize.

We must also rid ourselves of the notion, often unconsciously entertained, that the expression “ Aryan homestead ” implies a family-seat or cluster of buildings, like a manor-house or a hamlet. All phrases, such as the “ home of the primitive Aryans ” and the “ one roof ” under which they are said to have lived, are nothing but figures of speech, and will prove fatally misleading, unless we bear in mind that the roof was the sky, and the home a habitation not made with hands, which may have looked eastward on the Oxus and westward on the Rhine. There is no reason, philological or ethnological, why the Iranians may not have been cradled on the steppes of the Aral Sea, and the Germans swaddled on the shores of the Baltic. This geographical extension would not impair their linguistic unity, nor produce greater physiological differences than actually exist. Vamberg says of the Turko-Tatars that, notwithstanding their wide diffusion from Corea to Northern Siberia and the Adriatic and a separation of fifteen centuries, their languages are only dialects, and a Yakut on the Lena would understand an Anatolian Turk to-day better than a Swiss understands a Siebenbürgen Saxon. It has been estimated that pastoral and nomadic communities average less than ten persons to a square mile, and that hunting tribes require ten thousand times as much land for their sustenance as agriculturists : from these data one can infer what a vast territory must have been occupied by the primitive Aryans, who lived from the products of the chase and their flocks. No discoveries, at least, which science has yet made concerning the origin and evolution of languages, or the development and differentiation of races, would render this immense aboriginal area of the Aryans inconsistent with their acknowledged relationship in speech, or their assumed ethnic affinities and ties of physical descent.

E. P. Evans.