vi THE ARYAN QUESTION. 297 



Turkestan; that the Siah-posh and Galtchas of the 

 mountainous harrier between Turkestan and India 

 are such; and that the same characters obtain large- 

 ly 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 amidst the flood of Finno-tataric peo- 

 ple which has inundated the rest of the interval 

 between the sources of the Dnieper and those of 

 the Oxus. If only more was known about the 

 Sarmatians and the Scythians of the oldest his- 

 torians, it is not improbable, I think, that we should 

 discover that, even in historical times, the area 

 occupied by the blond long-heads of Aryan speech 

 has been, at least temporarily, continuous 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 ex- 

 tended 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, ap- 

 pears to the contrary, it may have been in the 

 west, or in the east, or anywhere between the two. 



