vr THE ARYAN QUESTION 293 



language was largely spoken, even in historical 

 times. 



In the same way, the tall blond tribes among 

 the Fins may be accounted for as the product of 

 admixture. The great majority of the Finno- 

 tataric people are brunet broad-heads of the 

 Asiatic type. But that the Fins proper have long 

 been in contact with Aryans is evidenced by the 

 many words borrowed from Aryan which their 

 language contains. Hence there has been abun- 

 dant opportunity for the mixture of races ; and 

 for the transference to some of the Fins of more 

 or fewer of the physical characters of the Aryans 

 and vice versa. On any hypothesis, the frontier 

 between Aryan and Finno-tataric people must 

 have extended across west-central Asia for a very 

 long period ; and, at any point of this frontier, 

 it has been possible that mixed races of 

 blond Fins or of brunet Aryans should be 

 formed. 



So much for the European people who now 

 speak Celtic, or Teutonic, or Slavonian, or Lithu- 

 anian tongues ; or who are known to have spoken 

 them, before the supersession of so many of the 

 early native dialects by the Romance modifications 

 of the language of Rome. With respect to the 

 original speakers of Greek and Latin, the un- 

 ravelling of the tangled ethnology of the Balkan 

 peninsula and the ordering of the chaos of that 

 of Italy are enterprises upon which I do not propose 



