Sept, 29, 1887] 



NATURE 



513 



India, that we ought to look for traces of the first home of the 

 Aryan family. 



But the theory of the Asiatic origin of the Indo-European 

 family has not only been deprived of its main support by the 

 dethronement of Sanskrit, and the transfer of its primacy to the 

 languages of Europe ; what Prof. Max Miiller has termed 

 "linguistic palaeontology " has further assisted in overthrowing 

 the crumbling edifice. When we find words of similar phonetic 

 form and similar meaning in both the Asiatic and the European 

 branches of the Aryan family — words, too, which it can be shown 

 have not been borrowed by one Indo-European language from 

 another — we are justified in concluding that the objects or 

 phenomena denoted by them were already known to the speakers 

 of the parent-language. When we find, for instance, that the 

 birch is known by the same name in both Sanskrit and Teutonic, 

 we may infer that it was a tree with which the speakers of the 

 mother-tongue of Sanskrit and Teutonic were acquainted, and 

 that consequently i:hey must have lived in a cold climate. In 

 Europe that would have been westward of a line drawn from 

 Konigsberg to the Crimea, to the east of which the birch-tree 

 does not grow. 



Four years ago a valuable contribution to the lingui>tic 

 palaontology of the Aryan languages was made by Prof. Otto 

 Schrader. For the first time the question was approached from 

 the present level of comparative philology, and all words were 

 excluded from comparison which did not satisfy the requirements 

 of phonetic law. The results were sadly disquieting to the 

 believers in that idyllic picture of primitive Aryan life to which 

 we had so long been accustomed. Prof. Schrader proved that 

 the speakers of the parent Aryan language must not only have 

 lived in a cold climate — a fact which was known already — but 

 that they must have lived in the Stone Age, with the skins of 

 wild beasts only to protect them from the rigours of the winter, 

 and nothing better than stone weapons with which to ward off 

 the attacks of savage animal^. Their general culture was on a 

 level wiih their general surroundings. It was little better than 

 that of the Fuegian before he came into contact with European 

 missionaries. The minuteness with which the varying degrees 

 of family relationship were named, instead of indicating an 

 advanced social life, as was formerly imagined, really indicated 

 the direct contrary. The primitive Aryan was indeed acquainted 

 with fire ; he could even sew his skins together by means of 

 needles of bone ; and possibly could spin a little with the help of 

 rude spindle-whorls ; but beyond this his knowledge of the arts 

 does not seem to have extended. If he made use of gold or 

 meteoric iron, it was only of the unwrought pieces which he 

 picked up from the ground and employed as ornaments ; of 

 the working of metals he was entirely ignorant. But he already 

 practised a kind of rude agriculture, though the art of grinding 

 corn was as yet unknown, and crushed spelt was eaten instead 

 of .bread; while the community to which he belonged was 

 essentially that of pastoral nomads, who changed from season 

 to season the miserable beehive huts of wattled mud in which 

 they lived. They could count at least as far as a hundred, 

 and believed in a multitude of ghosts and goblins, making 

 offerings to the dead, and seeing in the bright sky a potent 

 deity. 



In calling the speaker of the Aryan parent-speech the primi- 

 tive Aryan 1 must not be supposed to be prejudging the question 

 as to the particular race to which he belonged. This is a 

 question which has recently been handled with great ability by 

 an Austrian anthropologist — Dr. Karl Penka. In a remarkable 

 book, published at the end of last year, he endeavours to sub- 

 stantiate the hypothesis advanced in an earlier work, and to show 

 that the first speakers of the Aryan languages were the lair- 

 haired, blue-eyed, light-complexioned dolichocephalic race 

 which is still found in its greatest purity in Scandinavia ; that it 

 was this race which in the Neolithic period spread southwards, 

 imposing its yoke upon subject populations, like the Norsemen 

 and Normans of later days, and carrying with it the dialects 

 which afterwards developed into the Aryan languages ; and that, 

 finally, it was the same race which in the remote days of the 

 Palaeolithic Age inhabited Western and Central Europe, where it 

 has left its remains in the typical skulls of Cannstatt and Engis. 

 Dr. Penka would ascribe to its long residence in the semi-arctic 

 climate of paUeolithic Europe the permanent blanching of its 

 skin and hair — a form of albinoism which Dr. Puesche in 1878 

 endeavoured to explain by the climatic conditions of the Rokitno 

 marshes in Russia, where he placed the cradle of the white 

 Aryan race. 



It cannot be denied that all the probabilities are at present on 

 Dr. Penka's side, so far as his main contention is concerned. 

 Without denying that the speakers of the Aryan parent-speech may 

 have already included slaves or wives of alien race, it is probable 

 that the majority of them were of one blood. They formed a 

 single community, nomad it is true, and therefore less likely to 

 mix with foreigners, but still sufficiently a single community to 

 speak a language the several dialects of which were so alike as 

 to be mutually intelligible. In the social condition in which the 

 speakers were, and in an age when the waste lands of the world 

 were still extensive, the greater part of such a community must 

 necessarily, we should think, have belonged to the same race. 1 he 

 evidences of language, moreover, as we have seen, point to a 

 cold and northerly climate as the original seat of the community ; 

 and since they further inform us that the birch was known to it, 

 we may conclude that this climate lay westward of Konigsberg 

 and Russia. Penka has striven to show that the animals whose 

 bones or shells are found in the Scandinavian kitchen-middens 

 are just those whose names are common to the Indo-European 

 languages, or at all events the European section of the latter. 

 Now, the skulls disinterred from the prehistoric burial-places of 

 Denmark and the southern districts of Sweden and Norway are, 

 for the most part, identical with the skulls still characteristic of 

 the Scandinavian population where they accompany a fair skin 

 and light hair and eyes. By combining these two facts we 

 arrive at the conclusion that the fair Scandinavian race is the 

 modern descendant of the race which spoke the parent-language 

 of the primitive Aryan community, and left traces of itself in 

 the Scandinavian kitchen-middens. The conclusion is -up- 

 ported by the testimony of history. On the one hand we have 

 the testimony of classical writers that the Aryan-speaking Kelts 

 of the Christian era were not the dark small -limbed population 

 which now occupies the larger part of France, but men of 

 large stature, with the blue eyes and fair hair of their Teutonic 

 brethren ; while the ideal specimens of humanity conceived 

 of by the aristocratic art of Italy and Greece were the golden- 

 haired Apollo and the blue-eyed Athene. On the other hand, it 

 was from Scandinavia that in later times other bands of warriors 

 poured forth, who made their way into the countries of the 

 Mediterranean, and even Asia, and established themselves as 

 conquering aristocracies in the midst of subject populations. The 

 Kelts succeeded in reaching Asia Minor, the Scando -German 

 hordes overthrew the Roman empire, the Northmen established 

 themselves from Russia on the east to Iceland and Greenland on 

 the wtst, and the Normans made Sicily their own long before the 

 days of the German Frederick. The only point in which the 

 later historical irruptions of the Scandinavian peoples differed 

 from their prehistoric ones was, that while the later irruptions 

 were made by sea, the older were made by land. The sail was 

 unknown to the tribes of the north until the age of their inter- 

 course with the Romans, from whom they borrowed both the 

 conception and the name of the saguhtm, or " sail." The course 

 of their migrations must have followed the valleys of the great 

 rivers. 



If Southern Scandinavia is thus to be regarded as the original 

 home of the Aryan languages, and if the race which first spoke 

 those languages, and which we may therefore call Aryan, is to 

 be identified with the Scandinavian type, it follows that the 

 further south and east we advance from this primary starting- 

 point the less pure will the type become. It will be in the neigh- 

 bourhood of that starting-point and in Northern Europe that we 

 shall expect to find the largest nuitiber of undiluted Aryan 

 languages and the purest examples of the Aryan breed. In 

 Greece and Armenia, in Persia and India, we must look for mix- 

 ture and decay. And such indeed is the fact. Mr. Wharton 

 has found, by a careful analysis of the Greek lexicon, that out of 

 2740 primary words only 1580 can be referred with any proba- 

 bility to an Indo-European origin, while the prevailing racial 

 type in ancient as in modern Greece was distinctly non-Aryan. 

 Indeed, I am inclined to believe that the culture revealed by the 

 excavations at Mykena;, Tiryns, and on other prehistoric Greek 

 sites belonged not to a Hellenic but to a pre-Hellenic population, 

 and that the Aryan Greeks first made their ap))earance in Hellas 

 at the epoch of what later tradition called the Dorian immigra- 

 tion. It was to the north that Greek legends pointed as the 

 primaeval home of the Hellenic race and civilization, and Dodona 

 ever continued to be revered as the oldest sanctuary of the 

 Hellenic world. In India it is notorious that the Aryan-speaking 

 Hindus entered the country from the north-west, and failed to 

 spread far into the burning plains of the south. The date of 



