118 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [YoL. II. 



cessive waves of short heads. Languages, too, would follow the analogy 

 of our continent. We may fairly allow to several an area equal to that 

 occupied by, let us say, the Chippewa and its correlated dialects, which 

 would permit of several languages in Europe, as distinct as those of 

 different families of Indians here. The Celtic language is surely a 

 survival of one of these prehistoric tongues, and how much stronger 

 language often is than race may be gathered from the many-complex- 

 ioned varieties of men who speak a Celtic tongue to-day. The active 

 competition between the races inhabiting Europe in lithic times would 

 naturally produce somewhere a breed of men more powerful than the rest 

 — certainly north of the Alps and the Carpathians, and probably not far 

 from the East German land, ever the breeder of heroes — which would 

 master Europe by degrees and spread even beyond the Caspian, then a 

 most extensive sea, to India. Thus arose the people we call Aryans. 



The idea that Europe was a completely afforested country at all times 

 seems an assumption. The aborigines knew the use of fire. Were there 

 no forest fires there as here? Were there no organised methods of 

 making a prairie and of keeping it burned? What mean the ox, the 

 horse, the sheep, if there were no champaign country ? It does not 

 even need man to remove the forests. Who can tell what the climate of 

 Europe was in respect to drought when the Caspian was a huge sea 

 extending to and beyond the Aral, including the valley of the Oxus 

 and other Asiatic valleys.-' iNorthern Africa, perhaps in consequence of 

 the change in winds which the shrinkage in Asiatic water-areas has 

 caused, is slowly drying up ; the great desert is much more arid than it 

 was in Roman times : this may indeed have been the moist region, parts 

 of Europe the dry one. We know th-t some countries, formerly 

 afforested, are bare to-day — Ireland, parts of France and Italy, perhaps 

 portions of Spain. Some of these have become almost treeless, entirely 

 through the ravages of goats and sheep, especially the former. There 

 must always have been chamois to destroy the forests of one mountain 

 district after another — themselves dying away or migrating as they 

 dimished their own food supply. En passant let us observe that no 

 writer on the cave animals of Europe takes any account of a most 

 important point, the probable annual migration of the larger mammals. 

 Winter and summer alternated in these early times as they do now, 

 and, just as the buffalo migrated according to the season, and the deer 

 in Minnesota and Wisconsin still do, being found hundreds of miles 

 further south at one period of the year than at another, so the northern 

 types found in the caves may have been killed or may have died there 

 during their winter migration to warmer climes, and vice versa with 

 southern types. 



