FIRST ORDINARY MEETING. 25 
the contest between the west and east went on with varying 
results; but since John Sobieski drove the Turks out of Austria 
the tide has turned. The Turk is on the eve of being driven out of 
Europe, half of Asia belongs to Russia and England, and European 
ideas and blood are everywhere changing the character of that con- 
tinent. As far as history informs us, population has moved as often 
from the west to the east as from the east to the west. 
The first opponent of the Asiatic origin of the Indo-Europeans, as 
far as I know, was one Schulz, who published a book on the source 
of the German race in 1826. The next considerable protest came 
from Omalius d’Halloy, who objected mainly on physiological 
grounds. He was followed by that eminently original thinker and 
suggestive writer, R. G. Latham, whose objections were philological. 
His argument is very clearly put in the following words : 
“Where we have two branches of the same division of speech 
separated from each other, one of which is the larger in area and 
the more diversified by varieties, and the other smaller and compara- 
tively homogeneous, the presumption is in favour of the latter being 
derived from the former rather than the former from the latter. To 
deduce the Indo-Europeans of Europe from the Indo-Europeans of 
Asia, in ethnology, is like deriving the reptiles of Great Britain from 
those of Ireland in herpetology.” 
Since he wrote these words his views have been adopted by a 
number of Germans, among whom may be mentioned Geiger, Cuno, 
and Benfey. The two former of these, with perhaps some excess of 
patriotism, place the cradle of the Indo-European race in the heart 
of Germany. Oscar Peschel places it in the Caucasus, but this is 
evidently a compromise. Poesche places it in the Rokitno Swamp in 
the neighbourhood of Pinsk in West Russia. There is here about 
the upper waters of the Dnieper an immense swampy region, which 
is said on the authority of a Russian traveller, Mainow, to be re- 
markable on account of the general lack of colour in all organic 
nature. Cases of albinism are very frequent, the horses are almost 
all gray or light yellow, the leaves of the trees are pale, and every- 
thing is dull and colourless. 
My conclusions are :— 
1. That the causes which in early times developed the existing 
differences of colour were partly or wholly climatic. 
