346 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



time or other, free and prolonged intercourse has taken place be- 

 tween the speakers of the same language. Philology, therefore, 

 while it may have a perfect right to postulate the existence of 

 a primitive Aryan " people," has no business to substitute " race " 

 for " people." The speakers of primitive Aryan may have been a 

 mixture of two or more races, just as are the speakers of English 

 and of French at the present time. 



The older philological ethnologists felt the difficulty which 

 arose out of their identification of linguistic with racial affinity, 

 but were not dismayed by it. Strong in the prestige of their 

 great discovery of the unity of the Aryan tongues, they were quite 

 prepared to make the philological and the biological categories 

 fit, by the exercise of a little pressure on that about which they 

 knew less. And their judgment was often unconsciously warped 

 by strong monogenistic proclivities, which at bottom, however 

 respectable and philanthropic their origin, had nothing to do 

 with science. So the patent fact that men of Aryan speech pre- 

 sented widely diverse racial characters was explained away by 

 maintaining that the physical differentiation was post- Aryan ; to 

 put it broadly, that the Aryans in Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir were 

 truly of one race; but that, while one colony, subjected to the 

 sweltering heat of the Gangetic plains, had fined down and dark- 

 ened into the Bengalee, another had bleached and shot up, under 

 the cool and misty skies of the north, into the semblance of Pome- 

 ranian grenadiers ; or of blue-eyed, fair-skinned, six-foot Scotch 

 Highlanders. I do not know that any of the Uhlans who fought 

 so vigorously under this flag are left now. I doubt if any one is 

 prepared to say that he believes that the influence of external 

 conditions, alone, accounts for the wide physical differences be- 

 tween Englishmen and Bengalese. So far as India is concerned, 

 the internal evidence of the old literature sufficiently proves that 

 the Aryan invaders were "white" men. It is hardly to be 

 doubted that they intermixed with the dark Dravidian aborigi- 

 nes ; and that the high-caste Hindoos are what they are in virtue 

 of the Aryan blood which they have inherited,* and of the select- 

 ive influence of their surroundings operating on the mixture. 



In the United States the negroes have spoken English for generations ; but no one on that 

 ground would call them Englishmen, or expect them to differ physically, mentally, or mor- 

 ally from other negroes." (Pall Mall Gazette, January 10, lSW.) But the "axiom in 

 ethnology" had been implied, if not enunciated, before my time ; for example, by Ecker 

 in 1865. 



* I am unable to discover good grounds for the severity of the criticism, in the name 

 of " the anthropologists," with which Prof. Max Miiller's assertion that the same blood 

 runs in the veins of English soldiers " as in the veins of the dark Bengalese," and that 

 there is " a legitimate relationship between Hindoo, Greek, and Teuton," has been visited. 

 So far as I know anything about anthropology, I should say that these statements may be 

 correct literally, and probably arc so substantially. I do not know of any good reason for 



