THE PRIMITIVE HOME OF THE ARYANS. 481 



It has been needful to enter iuto these details before we can approach 

 the question, What was the original home of the parent Indo-Euro- 

 l)eaTi language ? They have been too often ignored or forgotten by 

 those who have set themselves to answer the question, and to this cause 

 must be ascribed the larger part of tiie misunderstandings and false 

 conclusions to which the inquiry has given birth. 



Until a few years ago, I shared the old belief that the parent speech 

 had its home in Asia, i)robably on the slopes of the Hindu Kush. The 

 fact that the languages of Europe and Asia alike possessed the same 

 words for " winter " and " ice" and " snow," and that the only two trees 

 Nvhose names were preserved by both — the "birch" and the "jiine" — 

 were inhabitants of a cold region, proved that this home did not lie in 

 the tropics. But the uplands of the Eindu Kush, or the barren steppes 

 in the neighborhood of the Caspian Sea, or even the valleys of Siberia, 

 would answer to the requirements presented by such words. Taken by 

 themselves they were fully compatible with the view that the first 

 speakers of the Indo European tongues were an Asiatic people. 



But when I came to ask myself what were the grounds for holding 

 this view, I could find none that seemed to me satisfactory. There is 

 much justice in Dr. Latham's remark that it is unreasonable to derive 

 the majority of the Indo-European languages from a continent to which 

 only two members of the group are known to belong, unless there is 

 an imperative necessity for doing so. These languages have grown out 

 of dialects once existing within the parent speech itself; and it cer- 

 tainly appears more probable that two of such dialects or languages 

 should have made their way into a new world, across the bleak plains 

 of Tartary, than that seven or eight should have done so. The argu- 

 ment, it is true, is not a strong one, but it raises at the outset a pre- 

 sumption in favor of Europe. Before the dialects had developed into 

 languages their speakers could not have lived far apart; there is in 

 fact evidence of this in the case of Sanskrit and Persian ; and a more 

 widely spread primitive community is implied by the numerous lan- 

 guages of Europe than by the two languages of Asia. A widley spread 

 community however is less likely to wander far from its original seat 

 than a community of less extent, more especially when it is a commun- 

 ity of herdsmen and the tract to be traversed is long and barren. 



Apart from the general prejudice in favor of an Asiatic origin due to 

 old theological teaching and the effect of the discovery of Sanskrit, I 

 can find only two arguments which have been supposed to be of suffi- 

 cient weight to determine the choice of Asia rather than of Europe as 

 the cradle of Indo-European speech. The first of these arguments is 

 linguistic, the second is historical or rather quasi historical. On the 

 one hand it has been laid down by eminent philologists that the less one 

 of the derived languages has deltected from the parent speech, the more 

 likely it is to be geographically nearer to its earliest home. The faith- 

 fulness of the record is a test of geographical proximity. As Sanskrit 

 H. Mis. 129 31 



