THE FRIMITIVE HOME OF THE ARYANS. 477 



the philologist would uot have advanced beyond the speculations and 

 guesses of classical scholars. What wonder then if the language which 

 had thus been a key to the mysteries of Greek and Latin, and which 

 seemed to embody older forms of speech than they, should have 

 been assumed to stand nearer to the Ursprache than the cognate lan- 

 guages of Europe ? The assumption was aided by the extravagant age 

 assigned to the monuments of Sanskrit literature. The poems of Ho- 

 mer might be old, but the hymns of the Veda, it was alleged, mounted 

 back to a primeval antiquity, while the Institutes of Manu represented 

 the oldest code of laws existing in the world. 



There was yet another reason which contributed to the belief that 

 Sanskrit was the first-born of the Indo-European family. The founders 

 of comparative philology had been preceded in their analytic work by 

 the ancient grammarians of India. It was from Panini and his prede- 

 cessors that the followers of Bopp inherited their doctrine of roots and 

 suffixes and their analysis of Indo-European w ords. The language of 

 the Veda had been analyzed 2,000 years ago as no other single language 

 had ever been analyzed before or since. Its very sounds had been care- 

 fully probed and distinguished, and an alphabet of extraordinary com- 

 pleteness had been devised to represent them. It appeared as if the 

 elements out of which the Sanskrit vocabulary and grammar had grown 

 had been laid bare in a way that was possible in no other language, and 

 in studying Sanskrit accordingly the scholars of Europe seemed to feel 

 themselves near to the very beginnings of speech. 



But it was soon perceived that if the primitive home of the Indo- 

 European languages were Asia, thej^ themselves ought to exhibit evi- 

 dences of the fact. There are certain objects and certain phenomena 

 which are peculiar to Asia, or at all events are not to be found in Europe, 

 and words expressive of these ought to be met with in the scattered 

 branches of the Indo-European family. If the parent language had been 

 spoken in India, the climate in which they were born must have left its 

 mark upon the face of its offspring. 



But here a grave difficulty presented itself. Men have short memo- 

 ries, and the name of an object which ceases to come before the senses 

 is either forgotten or transferred to something else. The tiger may 

 have been known to the speakers of the parent language, but the words 

 that denoted it would have dropped out of the vocabulary of the derived 

 languages which were spoken in Europe. The same word which signi- 

 fies ati oak in Greek signifies a beech in Latin. We can not expect to 

 to find the European languages employing words with meanings which 

 recall objects met with only in Asia. 



How then are we to force the closed lips of our Indo-European lan- 

 guages, and comi)el them to reveal the secret of their birth-place f At- 

 tempts have been made to answer this question in two different ways. 



On the one hand it has been assumed that the absence in ai)articular 

 language, or group of languages, of a term which seems to have been 



