THE ARYANS IN SCIENCE AND HISTORY. 681 



between the Berber and tlie Basque languages, etbnologists would 

 be inclined to class them together. The Iberians, however, per- 

 haps from their more northern and rugged abode, seem to have 

 been a sturdier race, and more stubborn in maintaining their 

 independence or reasserting it after a defeat. They occupied 

 apparently the Spanish Peninsula, the greater part of France, the 

 British Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, and probably a large portion 

 of Italy, where they seem to have been mingled with the Semitic 

 Pelasgians. The Aryan conquest, which in their case was incom- 

 plete, made little change in their character, except in Italy. In 

 the far west the Celts have always shown the genuine Iberian 

 character — the strong family affections, the love of home, the 

 cheerfulness under all troubles, the sense of personal and tribal 

 independence, and the jealous impatience of arbitrary power. To 

 these traits the Aryans added in Italy a stronger infusion than 

 was perhaps found anywhere else of their warlike and disciplined 

 energy, and of their tendency to barbarity in war and to the inflic- 

 tion of cruel punishments in time of peace. 



When the Aryan invaders entered the northern and central 

 portions of Europe, they found that region occupied by tribes of 

 the Uralian or Finnish type. On this point, and on the general 

 question of the early peopling of Europe, I may cite the opinion 

 pronounced, after many years of study, by one of the most emi- 

 nent anthropologists of Europe, whose conclusions will be ad- 

 mitted by all to be entitled to the greatest weight — M. de Quatre- 

 fages. Referring in one of his recent works — "Homines Fossiles 

 et Homines Sauvages " — to the " Finnish group," he observes : 

 " This group has for European ethnogeny a very great importance. 

 We know to what hypotheses, to what discussions, it has given 

 rise. Both have been often premature, because the facts that were 

 needed to establish the conclusions were not yet discovered. The 

 * Finnish theory,' to use the expression of Latham, is certainly 

 wrong when it regards the whole of Europe as having been inhab- 

 ited, before the arrival of the Aryans, by a single race, extending 

 from Gibraltar to the Arctic Ocean — a race of whose existence 

 the Finns would be merely the evidence. It is in the right when 

 it admits the existence of a pre- Aryan population. This is a fact 

 which can not now be questioned. We may affirm, moreover, that 

 this population was not homogeneous ; that it numbered several 

 very distinct races ; that these races have not been annihilated ; 

 that they have borne an important part in the formation of the 

 existing populations, and that, in certain cases at least, they con- 

 stituted in them the preponderant element." It is, of course, 

 highly satisfactory to find that the conclusions to which linguists 

 have been led by philological data are thus fully confirmed by the 

 minute and careful studies of the physical types of European 



