274 THE ARYAN QUESTION vi 



somewhere or other on the earth's surface. Hence 

 philology, without stepping beyond its legitimate 

 bounds and keeping speculation within the limits 

 of bare necessity, arrives, not only at the con- 

 ceptions of Aryan languages and of a primitive 

 Aryan language ; but of a primitive Aryan people 

 and of a primitive Aryan home, or country occupies 

 by them. 



But where was this home of the Aryans ? When 

 the labours of modern philologists began, Sanskrit 

 was the most archaic of all the Aryan languages 

 known to them. It appeared to present the 

 qualifications required in the parental or primitive 

 Aryan. Brilliant Uhlans made a charge at this 

 opening. The scientific imagination seated the 

 primitive Aryans in the valley of the Ganges ; and 

 showed, as in a visior? the successive columns, 

 guided by enterprising Brahmins, which set out 

 thence to people the regions of the western world 

 with Greeks and Celts and Germans. But the 

 progress of philology itself sufficed to show that 

 this Balaclava charge, however magnificent, was 

 not profitable warfare. The internal evidence of 

 the Vedas proved that their composers had not 

 reached the Ganges. On the other hand, the 

 comparison of Zend with Sanskrit left no 

 alternative open to the assumption that these 

 languages were modifications of an original Indo- 

 Iranian tongue, spoken by a people of whom the 

 Aryans of India and those of Persia were offshoots, 



