EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



opens up to us, as with a magician's wand, a 

 fascinating picture of the life and pursuits and 

 habits of thought of the people from whose 

 long-perished form of speech our vowels and 

 consonants are derived. 



Wonderful as this may seem, what is simpler, 

 when we have once ascertained that a certain 

 word belonged to the Old Aryan language, than 

 the inference that the word was used to describe 

 some object or express some thought? And 

 where the meaning of the word has remained 

 uniform throughout all the vicissitudes of pro- 

 nunciation and inflection to which it has been 

 subjected, what better guarantee do we need that 

 the word was used with the same meaning in 

 the mother tongue ? It requires no extraordi- 

 nary insight, when one has mastered the rules 

 of comparative grammar, to see that the primi- 

 tive Aryan called his nearest relatives by the 

 names patar, matar, bhratar, svasar, sunu, and 

 dhugatar ; or that when he learned to count up 

 to ten he said something like aina, dva, tri, kat- 

 var y pankan, ksvaks y sap (an, aktan, navan, dakan. 



Proceeding in this way, we find abundant 

 evidence that the early Aryans had outgrown 

 the nomad stage of civilization and acquired 

 settled habitations, not merely in villages, but 

 even in fortified towns. The Lat. domus reap- 

 pears, with hardly any change, in Gr. So/uos, 

 Skr. dama, Armen. do km, Irish daimh, and Russ. 

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