VI THE ARYAN QUESTION 299 



Scandinavia, or in northern Germany, or in 

 northern Russia, than they can live now in the 

 interior of Greenland, seeing that the land was 

 covered by a great ice sheet like that which at 

 present shrouds the latter country. At that 

 epoch, the blond long-heads cannot reasonably be 

 supposed to have occupied the regions in which 

 we meet with them in the oldest times of which 

 history has kept a record. 



But even if we are content to assume a vastly 

 less antiquity for the Aryan race ; if we only make 

 the assumption, for which there is considerable 

 positive warranty, that it has existed in Europe 

 ever since the end of the pleistocene period 

 when the fauna and flora assumed approximately 

 their present condition and the state of things 

 called Recent by geologists set in we have to 

 reckon with a distribution of land and water, not 

 only very different from that which at present ob- 

 tains in northern Eurasia, but of such a nature 

 that it can hardly fail to have exerted a great 

 influence on the development and the distribution 

 of the races of mankind. (See page 250, note 2 .) 



At the present time, four great separate bodies 

 of water, the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Sea of 

 Aral, and Lake Balkash, occupy the southern end 

 of the vast plains which extend from the Arctic 

 Sea to the highlands of the Balkan peninsula, of 

 Asia Minor, of Persia, of Afghanistan, and of the 

 high plateaus of central Asia as far as the Altai. 



