246 SPAKKS FKOM A GEOLOGIST'S HAMMEK. 



Hindu-Kush into the peninsula of India. In Central Asia 

 the ancestors of the Hindus, Iranians and Europeans were 

 one people. There arose the Brahmanic and Zoroastrian 

 religions. But the sacred books of the latter contain allu- 

 sions to a remoter time, when the ancestors of the Ar- 

 yans dwelt in a country blessed with seven months of 

 summer. This was Aryana-Vaejo, a land of delight, given 

 by Ahura-Mazda, and supposed to have been located in 

 Southern Turkestan, upon the Plateau of Pamir, or some- 

 what farther east in the beautiful valley of Cashgar. 

 But lest this paradise should tempt all nations to crowd 

 in and overpopulate it, the " evil being, Angra-Mainyus 

 (Ahriman), full of death, created a mighty serpent, and 

 winter, the work of the Devas." Now ten months of 

 frost prevailed, succeeded by only two months of sum- 

 mer. Of this transformed region, the Vendidad says: 

 "There is the heart of winter; there all around falls 

 deep snow; there is the worst of evils." So the ances- 

 tors of the Zoroastrians migrated from Aryana-Vaejo, 

 or Old Iran, southward into New Iran within the modern 

 Afghanistan.* 



The Vendidad, indeed, seems to contain reminiscences 

 of remoter migrations, stretching from the Caucasus to 

 the " Five Rivers," or Punjab, interrupted by fourteen dif- 

 ferent stations or pauses, like those of the Israelites 



* Is there no analogy between the Aryana-Vaejo of the Zend-Avesta and the 

 Eden of the Hebrew sacred books? In both, the primitive home of the white 

 race was a country of spontaneous productiveness and a delightful climate. 

 Both lands were given by a beneficent Deity for human occupation. From both 

 lands our ancestors were driven through the machinations of the Evil One. In 

 both narratives the power of evil is personified in a serpent. The consequence 

 in both narratives is the necessity of resort to cultivation of the soil for the pro- 

 duction of bread. May both narratives be pictures reproducing from national 

 memory the same encroachment of physical severities upon the same land of 

 edenic delights? 



