304 THE ARYAN QUESTION. vi 



that now included between the Black Sea, the At- 

 lantic, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean. 



If we imagine the blond long-head race to have 

 been spread over this area, while the primitive 

 Aryan language was in course of formation, its 

 north-western and its south-eastern tribes will have 

 been 1,500, or more, miles apart. Thus, there will 

 have been ample scope for linguistic differentia- 

 tion; and, as adjacent tribes were probably influ- 

 enced by the same causes, it is reasonable to sup- 

 pose that, at any given region of the periphery the 

 process of differentiation, whether brought about 

 by internal or external agencies, will have been 

 analogous. Hence, it is permissible to imagine 

 that, even before primitive Aryan had attained 

 its full development, the course of that develop- 

 ment had become somewhat different in different 

 localities; and, in this sense, it may be quite true 

 that one uniform primitive Aryan language never 

 existed. The nascent mode of speech may very 

 early have got a twist, so to speak, towards Lithu- 

 anian, Slavonian, Teutonic, or Celtic, in the north 

 and west; towards Thracian and Greek, in the 

 south-west; towards Armenian in the south; to- 

 wards Indo-Iranian in the south-east. With the 

 centrifugal movements of the several fractions of 

 the race, these tendencies of peripheral groups 

 would naturally become more and more intensi- 

 fied in proportion to their isolation. No doubt, in 

 the centre and in other j^arts of the periphery of 



