THE ARYANS IN SCIENCE AND HISTORY. 673 



edge, been the home of Aryan communities. The reasons for 

 accepting it as the peculiar seat of the race seemed conclusive to 

 ethnologists until a very recent date. Of late years some scholars 

 of high rank, both in Germany and in England, have been led to 

 adopt the suggestion, first made by the late eminent English phi- 

 lologist. Dr. Latham, that the Aryans may have been of European 

 origin. Their arguments were well summed up in the interesting 

 address delivered last year before the Section of Anthropology in 

 the British Association by the president of the section. Prof. 

 Sayce. They have since been fully considered and discussed by 

 Prof. Max Miiller in his recent work, "Biographies of Words, 

 and the Home of the Aryans." His decision is that to which the 

 great majority of ethnologists have long since given their assent, 

 namely, that the preponderant weight of argument points to an 

 Asiatic home for the race. Some of the grounds for this conclu- 

 sion will presently be shown ; but, in the first instance, it becomes 

 necessary to fix the locality of this primitive seat somewhat more 

 definitely than it is placed in Prof. Max Miiller's essay. He finds 

 that the Aryan home must have been " somewhere in Asia," but 

 declines to say more. 



This conclusion, it is evident, is too indefinite for science ; nor 

 does it seem likely that the learned author, if he had cared to be 

 more precise, would have had any difficulty in drawing a much 

 narrower limit. The " method of elimination " is easily sufficient 

 for this end. From the whole of Asia we strike out at once, by 

 the common consent of ethnologists, its eastern third, comprising 

 China, Japan, and Thibet, and along with it, by like consent, 

 the three great southern peninsulas, the Indo-Chinese, the Indian, 

 and the Arabian. With Arabia the rest of the ancient Semitic 

 countries, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Phoenicia, will be erased from 

 the problem. The immense expanse of Siberia will also disap- 

 pear ; for, though one bold speculator has sought a frigid home 

 for the early Aryans in that region, he has, as might be supposed, 

 gained no adherents to his theory. No one proposes Asia Minor ; 

 and Armenia and the Caucasus seem put out of the question by 

 the fact that our earliest historical knowledge of those regions 

 shows them inhabited mainly by non-Aryan tribes. 



The limits of the pristine Aryan home are thus readily and 

 inevitably narrowed down to those already suggested — the bounds 

 of ancient Persia and Bactria — that "vast plateau of Iran," as 

 Archdeacon Farrar has well styled it, in which the mother- 

 tongue of the Sanskrit and Zend was once spoken by the united 

 community, from whose divided septs the Vedas and the Zend- 

 Avesta have been bequeathed to us. In that region, as we have 

 every reason to believe, the Aryan race was found in its purest 

 condition. When, therefore, we seek to ascertain the physical 

 VOL. xxxiv. — 43 



