vi THE ARYAN QUESTION. 279 



Latin " race " to the divers people who speak Ko- 

 mance languages, at the present day, is none the 

 less absurd because 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. " Kace " is the name of a sub-divi- 

 sion 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 organs of speech; the enuncia- 

 tion 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 com- 

 plex speaking apparatus should determine a man's 

 linguistic potentiality; that is to say, should en- 



