354 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that tall blond people make their appearance sporadically among 

 the Tadjiks of Persia and of Turkistan ; that the Siah-posh and 

 Galtchas of the mountainous barrier between Turkistan and In- 

 dia are such ; and that the same characters obtain largely among 

 the Kurds on the western frontier of Persia at the present day. 

 The Kurds and the Galtchas are generally broad-headed, the 

 others are long-headed. These people and the ancient Alans thus 

 form a series of stepping-stones between the blond Aryans of 

 Europe and those of Asia, standing up amid the flood of Finno- 

 Tataric people which has inundated the rest of the interval be- 

 tween the sources of the Dnieper and those of the Oxus. If only 

 more was known about the Sarmatians and the Scythians of the 

 oldest historians, it is not improbable, I think, that we should dis- 

 cover that, even in historical times, the area occupied by the blond 

 long-heads of Aryan speech has been, at least temporarily, con- 

 tinuous from the shores of the North Sea to central Asia. 



Suppose it to be admitted, as a fair working hypothesis, that 

 the blond long-heads once extended without a break over this 

 vast area, and that all the Aryan tongues have been developed 

 out of their original speech, the question respecting the home of 

 the race when the various families of Aryan speech were in the 

 condition of inceptive dialects remains open. For all that, at 

 first, appears to the contrary, it may have been in the West, or 

 in the East, or anywhere between the two. In seeking for a solu- 

 tion of this obscure problem, it is an important preliminary to 

 grasp the truth that the Aryan race must be much older than the 

 primitive Aryan speech. It is not to be seriously imagined that 

 the latter sprang suddenly into existence, by the act of a jealous 

 Deity, apparently unaware of the strength of man's native tend- 

 ency toward confusion of speech. But if all the diverse lan- 

 guages of men were not brought suddenly into existence, in order 

 to frustrate the plans of the audacious bricklayers of the plain of 

 Shinar; if this professedly historical statement is only another 

 " type," and primitive Aryan, like all other languages, was built 

 up by a secular process of development, the blond long-heads, 

 among whom it grew into shape, must for ages have been, philo- 

 logically speaking, non- Aryans, or perhaps one should say, " pro- 

 Aryans." I suppose it may be safely assumed that Sanskrit and 

 Zend and Greek were fully differentiated in the year 1500 B. c. If 

 so, how much further back must the existence of the primitive 

 Aryan, from which these proceeded, be dated ? And how much 

 further yet, that real juvenilis rnundi (so far as man is con- 

 cerned) when primitive Aryan was in course of formation ? And 

 how much further still the differentiation of the nascent Aryan 

 blond long-head race from the primitive stock of mankind ? 



If any one maintains that the blond long-headed people, among 



