344 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



readable. The impression left upon my mind, at that time, by 

 various conversations about the " Sarmatian hypothesis/' which 

 my friend wished to subsitute for the Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir specu- 

 lation, 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, ap- 

 peared 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, 

 Latham's views, so long neglected, or mentioned merely as an ex- 

 ample of insular eccentricity, have been taken up and advocated 

 with much ability in Germany as well as in this country prin- 

 cipally by philologists. Indeed, the glory of Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir 

 seems altogether to have departed. Prof. Max Miiller, 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 Ar- 

 yans 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 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 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 peojue all 

 those who speak Romance dialects. But, just as the application 

 of the term Latin " race " to the divers people who speak Ro- 

 mance languages, at the present day, is none the less absurd be- 



* Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples. Translated by F. B. Jevons, 

 M. A., 1890. Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, 1890. 



