ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 471 



priori improbability of finding man unchanged, while all the other ver- 

 tebrate animals around him have, from natural causes, undergone 

 more or less extensive modification, will induce all careful investigators 

 to look closely at any evidence that would carry him back beyond 

 Quaternary times ; and though it would be unsafe to deny the possibil- 

 ity of such an early origin for the human race, it would be unwise to 

 regard it as established except on the clearest evidence. 



Another question of more general interest than that of the existence 

 of Tertiary man is that of the origin and home of the Aryan family. 

 The views upon this subject have undergone important modification 

 during the last 20 years. The opinions based upon comparative phi- 

 lology alone have received a rude shock and the highlands of Central 

 Asia are uo longer accepted without question as the cradle of the Aryan 

 family, but it is suggested that their home is to be sought souiewhere 

 in northern Europe. While the Germans contend that the primitive 

 Aryans were the blue eyed dolichocephalic race of which the Scandi- 

 navians and North Germans are typical examples, the French are in 

 favor of the view that the dark-haired brachycephalic race of Gauls, 

 now well represented in the Auvergne, is that of the primitive Aryans. 

 I am not going to enter deeply into this question, on which Canon Isaac 

 Taylor has recently published a comprehensive treatise, and Mr. Frank 

 Jevons a translation of Dr. Schrader's much more extensive work, 

 " The Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples." Looking at the 

 changes that all languages undergo, (even when they have the advan- 

 tage of having been reduced into the written form.) and bearing in mind 

 the rapidity with which these changes are effected; bearing in mind, 

 also, our extreme ignorance of the actual forms of language in use 

 among prehistoric races unacquainted with the art of writing, I, for 

 one, can not wonder at a something like a revolt having arisen against 

 the dogmatic assertions of those who have, in their efforts io re construct 

 earlj' history, confined themselves simply to the comparative study of 

 languages and grammar. But notwithstanding any feeling of this 

 kind, 1 think that all must admire the enormous industry and the 

 varied critical faculties of those who have pursued these studies, and 

 must acknowledge that the results to which they have attained can not 

 lightly be set aside, and that so far as language alone is concerned, 

 the different families, their provinces, and mutual relations, have in the 

 main become fairly established. The study of " linguistic paleontol- 

 ogy," as it has been termed will help uo doubt in determining still 

 more accurately the aflinities of the different forms of language, and in 

 fixing the dates at which one separated from another, as well as the 

 position that each should occupy on the family tree, if such a tree 

 exists. But even here there is danger of relying too much on negative 

 evidence ; and the absence — in the presumed original Aryan language — 

 of s;)ecial words for certain objects in general use, ought not to be re- 

 garded as affording absolute proof that such objects were unknown at 



