THE ARYAN QUESTION AND PREHISTORIC MAN. 345 



cause it is common ; so it is quite possible that it may be equally- 

 wrong to call the people who spoke the primitive Aryan dialects 

 and inhabited the primitive home, the Aryan race. " Aryan " is 

 properly a term of classification used in philology. "Race" is 

 the name of a subdivision of one of those groups of living things 

 which are called " species " in the technical language of zoology 

 and botany ; and the term connotes the possession of characters 

 distinct from those of the other members of the species, which 

 have a strong tendency to appear in the progeny of all members 

 of the races. Such race-characters may be either bodily or 

 mental, though in practice, the latter, as less easy of observation 

 and definition, can rarely be taken into account. Language is 

 rooted half in the bodily and half in the mental nature of man. 

 The vocal sounds which form the raw materials of language 

 could not be produced without a peculiar conformation of the or- 

 gans of speech ; the enunciation of duly accented syllables would 

 be impossible without the nicest co-ordination of the action of the 

 muscles which move these organs ; and such co-ordination depends 

 on the mechanism of certain portions of the nervous system. It 

 is therefore conceivable that the structure of this highly complex 

 speaking apparatus should determine a man's linguistic poten- 

 tiality ; that is to say, should enable him to use a language of one 

 class and not another. It is further conceivable that a particular 

 linguistic potentiality should be inherited and become as good a 

 race-mark as any other. As a matter of fact, it is not proved 

 that the linguistic potentialities of all men are the same. It is 

 affirmed, for example, that, in the United States, the enunciation 

 and the timbre of the voice of an American-born negro, however 

 thoroughly he may have learned English, can be readily distin- 

 guished from that of a white man. But, even admitting that dif- 

 ferences may obtain among the various races of men, to this ex- 

 tent, I do not think that there is any good ground for the suppo- 

 sition that an infant of any race would be unable to learn, and to 

 use with ease, the language of any other race of men among 

 whom it might be brought up. History abundantly proves the 

 transmission of languages from some races to others ; and there 

 is no evidence, that I know of, to show that any race is incapable 

 of substituting a foreign idiom for its native tongue. 



From these considerations it follows that community of lan- 

 guage is no proof of unity of race, is not even presumptive evi- 

 dence of racial identity.* All that it does prove is that, at some 



* Canon Taylor (Origin of the Aryans, p. 31) states that " Cuno . . . was the first to 

 insist on what is now looked on as an axiom in ethnology that race is not coextensive 

 with language," in a work published in 1871. I may be permitted to quote a passage 

 from a lecture delivered on the 9th of January, 1S70, which brought me into a great deal 

 of trouble. " Physical, mental, and moral peculiarities go with blood and not with language. 

 vol. xxxviii. 24 



