CHAP, xxiii. ARYAN HYPOTHESIS AND CONTROVERSY. 455 



this supposition it would be impossible to account for their 

 structure and composition, as, for example, for the forms of 

 the auxiliary verb ( to be,' all evidently varieties of one 

 common type, while it is equally clear that no one of the six 

 affords the original form from which the others could have 

 been borrowed. So also in none of the six languages do we 

 find the elements of which these verbal and other forms 

 could have been composed ; they must have been handed 

 down as relics from a former period, they must have existed 

 in some antecedent language, which we know to have been 

 the Latin. 



But, in like manner, he goes on to show, that Latin itself, 

 as well as Greek, Sanscrit, Zend (or Bactrian), Lithuanian, 

 old Sclavonic, Gothic, and Armenian are also eight varieties 

 of one common and more ancient type, and no one of them 

 could have been the original from which the others were 

 borrowed. They have all such an amount of mutual resem 

 blance, as to point to a more ancient language, the Aryan, 

 which was to them what Latin was to the six Romance 

 languages. The people who spoke this unknown parent 

 speech, of which so many other ancient tongues were off 

 shoots, must have migrated at a remote era to widely sepa 

 rated regions of the old world, such as Northern Asia, 

 Europe., and India south of the Himalaya.* 



The soundness of some parts of this Aryan hypothesis has 

 lately been called in question by Mr, Crawfurd, on the 

 ground that the Hindoos, Persians, Turks, Scandinavians, 

 and other people referred to as having derived not only 

 words but grammatical forms from an Aryan source, belong 

 each of them to a distinct race, and all these races have, it is 

 said, preserved their peculiar characters unaltered from the 

 earliest dawn of history and tradition. If, therefore, no 



* Max Miiller, Comparative Mythology. Oxford Essays, 1856. 



