GEOLOGY. 235 



civilization. With the exception of a few inconsiderable islands, every 

 region has, within the historical period, been found peopled, and usu- 

 ally with a race peculiar to itself. The peopling of these countries by 

 migration must have taken place in very rude times ; and in such 

 times nothing short of a great miracle could have brought it about. It 

 is only within the last three centuries and a half that the existence of 

 half the inhabitants of the world became known to the other half. 

 But for one race of men more highly endowed than the rest, the dif- 

 ferent races of mankind would now have been unknown to each other. 

 It is this superior race which still keeps them in mutual acquaintance, 

 or at least in intercommunication. I conclude, then, that there is no 

 shadow of evidence for the unity of the human race, and none for its 

 having undergone any appreciable change of form. If one thousand 

 years, or fourthousand, or one hundred thousand, --supposing this last 

 to be the age of the skeletons of the Belgian race contemporary with 

 the mammoth, have effected no appreciable change, it is reasonable 

 to believe that multiplying any of these sums by a million of years 

 would yield nothing but the same cipher. 



Mr. Lyell has adopted the Aryan theory of language, and fancies 

 he finds in it an illustration of the hypothesis of the transmutation of 

 species by natural selection. The Aryan or Indo-European theory, 

 which had its origin and its chief supporters in Germany, is briefly as fol- 

 lows : In the most elevated table-land of Central Asia there existed, 

 in times far beyond the reach of history or tradition, a country, to 

 which, on very slender grounds, the name of Aryana has been given, 

 the people and their language taking their name from the country, 

 The nation, a nomadic one, for some unknown cause betook itself to 

 distant migrations, one section of it proceeding in a southeastern di- 

 rection across the. snows and glaciers of the Himalayas, to people Hin- 

 dustan, and another in a northwesterly direction, to people Western 

 Asia and Europe, as far as Spain and Britain. " Before that time," 

 says Prof. Max Miiller, the most recent expounder of the theory, " the 

 soil of Europe had not been trodden by either Celts, Germans, Sclavo- 

 nians, Romans, or Greeks," an assertion which can be interpreted to 

 signify only that Europe at least was, before the supposed migration, 

 uninhabited. According to the theory," the human skeletons found in 

 the caverns near Liege must have belonged to the nomadic wanderers 

 from Central Asia or their descendants ; and so the era of the imagin- 

 ary migration carries us back to a time when man was a contemporary 

 of the extinct mammoth, the cave-lion, and rhinoceros. 



The entire fabric is founded on the detection of words, in a 

 mutilated form, common to most, but not to all, of the languages .of 

 Western Asia and Europe, a discovery, no doubt sufficiently remark- 

 able, but clearly pointing only to an antiquity in the history of man 

 far beyond the reach of history or tradition. A language which the 

 theorists have been pleased to call the Aryan is the presumed source 

 of the many languages referred to. But the Aryan is but a language 

 of the imagination, of the existence of which no proof ever has been, 

 or ever can be adduced. The object of the theory would seem to be 

 to prove that the many languages called the Aryan, or Indo-European, 

 sprang all of them from a single source. The doctrine is extended to 

 all the other languages of the earth, with the hope of reducing them 



