328 THE POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY. 



for a considerable period neighbors, which is confirmed by the inti- 

 mate correspondence of their religious and tribal traditions, so that, ■ 

 even after a separation, the Hamites and Semites yet formed an indis- 

 soluble unit. Their identity continued during the period of speech- 

 growth, and was first lost when, through the pressure of the Upper 

 Asiatic bands, the Hamites were sundered from the Semites, and were 

 pushed on one side into the region bordering the Tigris and Euphrates, 

 and on the other into Africa. 



As we have already considered the immigration of the Hamites into 

 the north of Africa in reviewing the peoples of this continent, there 

 only remain to be examined the Semitic and Indo-European stocks. 



Everywhere where the Semites appear we find them successors of 

 the Hamites. It is so in Mesopotamia, in Palestine, in north Africa, 

 presumably in Arabia, as it would seem from the dialects retained 

 in south Arabia, entirely distinct from the Arabian tongue, and, last- 

 ly, in Abyssinia, a settlement effected from southwestern Arabia and 

 across the Red Sea. In most places the Hamitic cultus disappears, 

 ethnologically speaking, in that of the Semites, only leaving traces of 

 its influence behind in the national characteristics. So in Mesopota- 

 mia, in Palestine — the Phcenicians are, for instance, Semiticized Ham- 

 ites — in Abyssinia. And only when we know that the inhabitants of 

 Mesopotamia are Semiticized Hamites is the harmony or coincidence 

 of the Assyrian-Babylonian culture (Semitic) with that of the Egyp- 

 tian (Hamitic) explained. 



As regards the Indo-Europeans, we have first sought their aborigi- 

 nal center about the sources of the Oxus and the Jaxartes, on the table- 

 lands of Pamir, presumably because this point is nearest to the homes 

 of two of the most easterly removed branches of this stock, viz., the 

 Iranians and the Indians, and both these people certainly entered their 

 territory from the northwest and northeast. But of late it has not 

 unreasonably been insisted that the vocabulary of the Indo-European 

 affords no evidence which intimates an acquaintance with the fauna 

 and flora of Asia. On the contrary, the names of most trees known to 

 all the Indo-European peoples, as birch, beech, oak, point rather to 

 eastern Europe than to Asia. Therefore many authorities incline to 

 locate the primitive home of the Indo-Europeans, or that point where 

 they last composed an homogeneous unit, in the Lithuanian-Russian 

 plains, or even farther west. 



When, in conformity with this view, which has a very strong like- 

 lihood in its favor, we assume the original center of the Indo-Europe- 

 ans to have been in southeastern Europe, then we can not but regard 

 them as autochthonous at this point, yet as having first reached here 

 from the Armenian highlands in the indefinite past. We are driven to 

 this hypothesis by the racial unity of the Indo-Europeans with the Ha- 

 mito-Semitic and Caucasian stocks, for it is impossible for both to have 

 emigrated from the west into the highlands overlying Mesopotamia. 



