446 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



persists in endlessly modified forms, they have themselves long 

 disappeared as a distinct race, merged in the countless other races 

 on whom they, perhaps as conquerors, imposed their Aryan lan- 

 guage. Hence we can and must speak of Aryan tongues, and of 

 an Aryan linguistic family, which continues to flourish and spread 

 over the globe. But of an Aryan race there can be no further 

 question since the absorption of the original stock in a hundred 

 other races in remote pre-historic times. Where comprehensive 

 references have to be made, I therefore substitute for Aryans and 

 Aryan race the expression peoples of Aryan speech, at least 

 wherever the unqualified term Aryan might lead to misunder- 

 standings. 



This way of looking at the question, which has now become 

 more thorny than ever, has the signal advantage of being indiffer- 

 ent to any preconceived theories regarding the physical characters 

 of that long vanished proto-Aryan race. How great this advantage 

 is may be judged from the mere statement that, while German 

 anthropologists are still almost to a man loyal to the traditional 

 view that the first Aryans were best represented by the tall, long- 

 headed, tawny-haired, blue-eyed Teutonic barbarians of Tacitus 

 who, Virchow tells us, have completely disappeared from sight in 

 the present population the Italian school, or at least its chief 

 exponent, Prof. Sergi, now assures us that the picture is a myth, 

 that such Aryans never existed, that "the true primitive Aryans 

 were not long, but round-headed, not fair but dark, not tall but 

 short, and are in fact to-day best represented by the round-headed 

 Kelts, Slavs, and South Germans 1 . 



The fact is that the Aryan prototype has vanished as com- 

 pletely as has the Aryan mother-tongue, and can be conjecturally 

 restored only by processes analogous to those by which Schleicher 

 and other philologists have endeavoured with dubious success to 

 restore the organic Aryan speech as constituted before the disper- 

 sion. At the same time one may perhaps venture to say that the 

 weight of evidence seems rather in favour of the German view 

 that the first Aryans answered better than any other race to the 



1 "Io non dubito di denominare aria questa stirpe etc. " (Uinbri, Italici, 

 Arii, Bologna, 1897, p. 14, and elsewhere). 



