EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



In the Vedic hymns the dominant people of 

 India habitually speak of themselves as Aryans, 

 in contrast with the Dasyus, or inferior races of 

 Hindustan, whom they had subdued. Just in 

 the same way Darius Hystaspes, in the inscrip- 

 tion upon his tomb, declares himself to be an 

 Aryan, of Aryan descent. The Medes are 

 always called Aryans by Armenian writers ; and 

 Herodotos was also familiar with this appella- 

 tion. In a more special sense the countries be- 

 tween India and Persia, now known as Afghan- 

 istan and Cabul, were known throughout classic 

 antiquity as Ariana. Along with this commu- 

 nity of name there was close community of 

 speech among these peoples. The court lan- 

 guage of the Medes and Persians, as preserved 

 in the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius, the Zend 

 or Baktrian language, in which the sacred books 

 of Zarathustra are written, and the Sanskrit of 

 the Vedic hymns are as clearly dialects of the 

 same parental language as French, Spanish, and 

 Italian are dialects of Latin. These outline 

 facts are all that we need for the present to 

 show how Aryan was the common name for a 

 race which, advancing from the north, acquired 

 supremacy over all the country between the 

 Euphrates and the mouth of the Ganges. 

 Whence these people originally came it would 

 be idle to inquire, but we may fairly conclude 

 that they first attained to something like world- 

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