684 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion of Europe. At lengtli a change occurred. The subject races 

 grew in strength. Various causes conduced to this result — the 

 invention of gunpowder and of printing, the discovery of Amer- 

 ica, the advance of science, and, finally, the operation of that nat- 

 ural law by which oppressed populations, unless kept down by 

 massacre, tend to increase faster than their oppressors. At last 

 the struggle came to a head in France, just a hundred years ago, 

 when, with the destruction of the Bastile, the Iberian race in that 

 country regained the control of its own destinies, and the ascend- 

 ency of hereditary rank, with its resulting system of arbitrary, 

 corrupt, and cruel government, was swept away. In the British 

 Islands, where the oppression was less severely felt, the recon- 

 quest has advanced, during the past two or three centuries, by 

 more gradual steps — from the Great Rebellion to the Reform Bill 

 of 1832, when the Uralian Saxons regained a substantial equal- 

 ity — and thence to the later movement of the present day, when 

 the still earlier Iberian stratum of population is rising to the light 

 and to its due share in the government. 



It is not, of course, to be inferred that the members of any 

 European aristocracy are all necessarily, or even probably, of 

 Aryan descent. There has, undoubtedly, been a large and often 

 repeated intrusion of members of other races into their ranks. In 

 ancient India, where the three higher castes, the Brahmans, Ksha- 

 triyas, and Vaisyas, claimed, and doubtless rightly, to be of Aryan 

 origin, it is certain that many Sudras, from the aboriginal races, 

 have found, from time to time, admission among them. But the 

 descendants of these intruders speedily became absorbed in the 

 caste which they had entered, and assumed all its characteristics. 

 When the hereditary or patrician principle was once introduced 

 into Europe by the Aryans — the principle that the son of a noble 

 was superior in political rights to the son of a commoner — a genu- 

 ine caste was at once established ; and this caste, while its mem- 

 bership has been partially changed, has, by the force of position 

 and of interfusion of blood, remained the same in character to our 

 day. Many a Norman baron was of plebeian origin, but the Nor- 

 man baronage was none the less an Aryan caste. The father of 

 Front-de-Boeuf may have been an Iberian peasant, but his chil- 

 dren and grandchildren became the members of a privileged aris- 

 tocracy, closely allied by blood and intermarriage with all the 

 other European aristocracies, and sharing with them the traits of 

 character which they had inherited from the Aryan conquerors. 



If any are disposed, even in the face of the striking evidence 

 of India and its caste-system, to question whether the results of a 

 conquest made in Europe probably not less than four thousand 

 years ago can be so clearly e^ddent at the present day, they may 

 be reminded of two facts which, in different ways, will serve to 



