6/8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



brave men for their earthly deities. The Turk, who bows im- 

 plicitly to the vicegerent of Allah, is too prond to lie. 



In intellectual capacity the people of the Iranic plateau held 

 but a low rank, not only in comparison with their Semitic neigh- 

 bors, but absolutely as a race. They had, indeed, or rather one 

 profound thinker among them had, excogitated a religious sys- 

 tem — the Zoroastrian — which is held to be of a cast consider- 

 ably superior to the religions of the neighboring nations ; but in 

 all other respects their inferiority was marked. Of the Semitic 

 Babylonians the historian observes that, " among the moral and 

 mental characteristics of the people the first place is due to their 

 intellectual ability. . . . Their wisdom and learning are celebrated 

 by the Jewish prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel. The Father 

 of History records their valuable inventions ; and Aristotle was not 

 ashamed to be beholden to them for scientific data. They were 

 good observers of astronomical phenomena, careful recorders of 

 such observations, and mathematicians of no small repute." Of 

 the Persians, on the other hand, he remarks that "we can not 

 justly ascribe to them any high degree of intellectual excellence." 

 The remains of their architecture and sculpture which have come 

 down to us display, he considers, a comparatively inferior artistic 

 ability ; and " to science," he declares, " they had contributed abso- 

 lutely nothing." It is deserving of note that not one of the great 

 in^;^entions and discoveries which have promoted the progress and 

 welfare of the human race seems to have been of Aryan origin. 

 For the alphabet, the smelting of metals, the making of glass, ship- 

 building, the mariner's compass, the methods of agriculture and 

 of textile manufactures, the laws of geometry and astronomy, the 

 world has been indebted to other races. We might be inclined to 

 ascribe the backwardness of the Aryans in these respects to the 

 disadvantages of their situation ; but we notice that they seem as 

 a race incapable of appreciating and adopting the gains of other 

 intellects. At the present day travelers find the Persians the 

 least advanced of the Oriental races. They are behind even the 

 Turks, and are far below the Chinese and the Japanese. They 

 are now, as of old, a brave, handsome, and showy race, prepossess- 

 ing and courtly, but are still shamefully servile, vilely cruel, 

 scornful of science, and fatally unprogressive. 



It is a common opinion that the excellence of the Aryan lan- 

 guage affords evidence of high intellectual capacity in its framers. 

 That there is some warrant for this view may be admitted ; but 

 it must be remembered that the opinion arose while the science of 

 comparative philology was in its infancy. The wider linguistic 

 knowledge of our times shows it to have been a greatly exagger- 

 ated estimate, the product to a large extent of mere ignorance and 

 the conceit of race. Capacity for expression is the main test of 



