A PRIMEVAL MOTHER TONGUE 



centuries, the kinship of Latin and Sanskrit is 

 equally unmistakable. It is not an occult fact, 

 which discloses itself only after a subtle philo- 

 logical analysis ; it is a fact so plain that no one 

 who reads Sanskrit and Latin books can possibly 

 overlook it, and it forced itself upon the atten- 

 tion of the first European scholars who studied 

 Sanskrit in the seventeenth century, though 

 they knew nothing of philological analysis as 

 we understand it. The similarity between the 

 long-known Hebrew and the lately deciphered 

 Assyrian is no less conspicuous ; and the same 

 may be said of the Dravidian languages of 

 southern India when compared with one another. 

 But as we leave this circle of studies, and 

 venture out into the wilderness of barbaric 

 speech, we find a very different state of things. 

 The northern portions of Asia have been in- 

 habited, within the period of history, by three 

 different races, all of whom still survive, the 

 Finno-Tataric, the Mongolian, and the Samo- 

 yedic races. The linguistic relationships of 

 these peoples are very instructive. In the first 

 place, the Finno-Tataric peoples appear to be- 

 long to the same white race from which the 

 Aryans and the Semites have diverged, although 

 there is nothing remotely resembling Aryan or 

 Semitic in Finno-Tataric speech. This family 

 of languages is represented in Europe by the 

 Finnish and its neighbouring dialects, by the 

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