24 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 
Among all the others blondes occur in greater or smaller proportions. 
In western Europe, wherever we have a large proportion of dark - 
whites, we have a good deal of evidence to show that there has been 
a mixture of the Indo-Europeans with the previous occupants of the 
soil. In Italy there were, in historic times, Etruscans and Ligurians, 
one, or both of which races were non-Aryan. In England, France, 
and Spain the evidence is strong that supports the theory that there 
is still a large amount of Iberian or Basque blood in the population. 
Now, if the original Aryans were blonde it is natural to look for 
their seat where there is to-day the largest fair-white population, that 
is, in the neighborhood of the Baltic and North Seas. Here, as a 
matter of fact, we find the Lithuanians, whose language of all living 
languages most closely approximates to the original Indo-European. 
Our Aryan ancestors were pre-eminently a cattle-rearing race, and 
there is a strong probability that the domestic cattle of Europe are 
descended from its native wild stocks. As they knew something of 
the sea, and apparently nothing of the camel or tiger, it does not 
appear probable that Eastern Turkestan was their original home. 
Western Turkestan, though bordering on a sea, is precluded by the 
infertility of its soil, and its utter unsuitability to the kind of life 
we know the Aryans must have led. It is probably true that the 
Persians and Hindoos lived together at one time in Eastern Turkestan, 
but that does not prove that they had not come there from some other 
place. Indeed, the hypothesis that Turkestan was the original seat of 
the Aryans, seems to have no better foundation than the belief that 
the west has been peopled from the east. It may be true that the 
first men who lived in Europe came from Asia. But that must have 
been at a period antecedent even to the very remote date at which 
the Aryan race developed its special characteristics. Within the 
historical period, at any rate, there have been as many advances of 
Europeans into Asia as of Asiatics into Europe. At the very 
beginning of written history we hear of a Persian invasion of Euro- 
pean Russia in retaliation for a previous invasion of Persia by 
Scythians from Russia. After the Persians’ failure to establish 
themselves in Europe, the Greeks established themselves in Asia and 
hellenized it more or less completely to the head waters of the Ganges. 
The reaction came when the Huns and Saracens penetrated to France. 
From the battle of Towrs, in which Charles the Hammer turned back 
the Mohammedans, to the siege of Vienna, two hundred years ago, 
