THE ARYAN QUESTION AND PREHISTORIC MAN. 343 



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 Brahmans, 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 Turkistan, 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 se- 

 cluded valleys and wind-swept wastes, successive swarms of Celts 

 and Greco-Latins, Teutons and Slavs, were thrown off to settle, 

 after long wanderings, in distant Europe. The Hindoo-Koosh- 

 Pamir 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 con- 

 fidence as if they had access to the records of the office of a primi- 

 tive Aryan quartermaster-general. It is really singular to ob- 

 serve 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 Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir theory 

 had risen almost to that of an axiom. The first person to instill 

 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 be- 

 stowed upon making his books not only worthy of being read, but 



