ORIENTAL SCHOLARSHIP DURING THE PRESENT CENTURY. 685 



new coimrmatioii of the Asiatic origin of the Aryas. But we hardly 

 want that axhlitional .support. Benfey's arguments in favor of a Euro- 

 pean origin of the Aryas were, no doubt, very ingenious. But, as his 

 objections have now been answered by one,* the ohl arguments for an 

 Asiatic home seem to me to have considerably gained in strength. I, 

 at all events, can no longer join in the jubilant chorus that, like all 

 good tilings, our noble ancestors, the Aryas, came from Germany. Dr. 

 Schrader, who is often quoted as a decided supporter of a European 

 origin of the Aryas, is far too conscientious a scholar to say more tlian 

 that all he has written on the subject should be considered " as purely 

 tentative." (Preface, p. vi.) 



With regard to time, our difticulties are greater still, and to attempt 

 to solve difticulties which can not be solved, seems to me no better than 

 the old attempt to square the circle. If people are satisfied with 

 approximate estimates, such as we are accustomed to iu geology, tliey 

 may say that some of the Aryan languages, such as Sanskrit in India, 

 Zend in Media, must have been finished and used metrical form about 

 2000 B. C. Greek followed soon after. And when it is said that these 

 languages were finished 2000 b. c, that means simply that they had 

 become independent varieties of that typical Aryan language which 

 had itself reached a highly finished state long before it was broken up 

 into these dialects. This tyi)ical language has been called tlie Profo- 

 Aryan language. We are often asked why it should be impossible to 

 calculate how many centuries it must have taken before that Proto- 

 Aryan language could have become so differentiated and so widely diver- 

 gent as Sanskrit is from Greek, or Latin from Gothic. If argued 

 geologically, we might say, no doubt, that it took a thousand years to 

 produce so small a divergence as that between Italian and French, and 

 that therefore many thousands of years would not suftice to account 

 for such a divergence as that between Sanskrit and Greek. We might, 

 therefore, boldly place the first divergence of the Aryan languages at 

 5000 B. c, and refer the united Aryan period to the time before 5000 

 B. G. That period again Avould recpiire many thousands of years, if we 

 are to account for all that had already become dead and purely formal 

 in the Proto- Aryan language before it began to break up into its six 

 ethnic varieties, that is, into Celtic^ Teutonic^ Slavonic, Greek, Latin, 

 and Indo-Eranie. - - - 



If then we must follow the example of geology and fix chronological 

 limits for the growth of the Proto-Aryan language previous to the con- 

 solidation of the six national langaages 10,000 b. c. would by no means 

 be too distant as to the probable limit of what I should call our his- 

 torical knowledge of the existence of Aryan speakers somewhere iu 

 Asia. 



And what applies to those Aryan speakers applies with even greater 

 force to the Semitic, because the earliest monuments of Semitic speech, 



* "Three lectures ou the science of laoguage," pp. 60 et sej. 



