February 1, 1888.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



77 



then, that the Church had lost the hold it had once had on 

 the confidence, if not on the aSections of the people. 



The nobility had in large degree forsaken the chivalry of 

 their forefathers, which, though coarse, was wholesome. 

 They were no longer distinguished from the commonalty by 

 valour or capacity, but only by splendour and luxury. 



While the old order had thus passed away, the new order 

 which was to replace it had not yet appeared. A sense of 

 insecurity, accompanied by a dis.solution of all restraints of 

 honour, can be recognised in all classes in that dark era of 

 English history. As Hume has well .said, " All that we 

 can distinguish with certainty through the deep cloud which 

 covers that period is a scene of hoiTor and bloodshed, 

 savage manners, arbitrary executions, and treacherous and 

 dishonourable conduct in all parties." If any man in that 

 age had reason to feel its .savagery, or was likely to be in- 

 fluenced by it, it was Eichard. In the earlier part of the 

 civil war his family were treated as traitors and rebels, his 

 father was slain, one brother forswore himself and fought 

 against his own relations, another murdered his traitorous 

 brother, and he hiniself had been compelled to endure and 

 inflict wrongs of the most cruel nature. His usurpation 

 and the crimes which followed it were a very natural sequel 

 to a life-experience so brutalising. 



Of Richard's domestic life we know little. History gives 

 no sort of support to the stories of domestic villany intro- 

 duced as parts of the picture of the Shake.spearian Richard. 

 It is unlikely that the real Richard was a dutiful son or an 

 affectionate husband, but history does record that he was a 

 loving father. Nay, some historians attribute his worst 

 crimes in part to his anxiety to secure the throne for his son 

 Prince Edward. 



ARCTIC ORIGIN OF ARYAN RACES. 



HERE are few developments of the genor.al 

 doctrine of evolution more interesting than 

 those which relate to language. The dis- 

 cussion of the origin of languages and 

 dialects, and their development after they 

 have come into existence, is sufliciently 

 interesting ; but more interesting still is the 

 study of languages in their relation to the past history of 

 races. It is as bearing on the e\-olution and development of 

 races, much more than as bearing on the evolution of lan- 

 guage, that philological researches chiefly interest the student 

 of science. 



There is one sulyect of special interest in the past history 

 of i-aces on which the stmly of language promises to throw 

 light. Whence did each race first come ? Whence, in par- 

 ticular, did that great division of the human i-ace, the 

 Aryan or Indo-European, to which we our.selves belong, 

 take its origin] Over what regions, again, has this par- 

 ticular stream of human life flowed since first it had separate 

 existence ? 



Of old, when the more thoughtful strove to deal with 

 such questions as the diversity of language, they gave com- 

 paratively simple answers to such questions as these. It 

 was enough to suppose that all men originally spoke one 

 language, and that that language was miraculously con- 

 founded, insomuch that different sets of men and women 

 (quite possibly different pairs) had to form different races 

 and nations. There w.as no difliculty in all this to primitive 

 thinkers. They could see no special reason why a single 

 pair should not start a thriving race ; indeed, they imagined 

 the process repeated whenever some new race was to be 

 originated, especially when it seemed to them that by such 

 a theory either the importance of their own special family 



might be enhanced, or the specially undesirable character of 

 their own enemies might be indicated. 



The question of the origin of Aryan races was one of 

 those with which primitive thinkers dealt in this simple 

 fashion. It was enough for them to conceive the .Japhetic, 

 Semitic, and Hamite races to have sprung from three men, 

 sons, indeed, of one father and one mother, but by special 

 interposition of deity provided with different, nay, widely 

 contrasted racial characteristics. It is to be presumed that, 

 following on this special ordinance, there was understood to 

 have been some arrangement by which the three great 

 divisions of the human race, thus originated, were kept 

 distinct one from the other — besides, of course, that mira- 

 culous ordering of things by which the degeneration of the 

 descendants of a single pair was supposed (if any attention at 

 all was given to this dilficulty) to have been in some way 

 prevented. 



It is hardly necessary to say that the Japhetian theory of 

 the origin of Aryan races has long since taken its place with 

 students of science beside the Babel theory of the origin of 

 languages. The Caucasian theory of Blumenbach, though 

 it held its ground long enough to give wide circulation to 

 the term Caucasian as a fit name lor the Ai-yan races, has 

 also long been abandoned. But no satis'actory solution had 

 yet been obtained for the problem of the origin of the 

 Aryans. Pott, Lassen, and Max Miiller maintained that 

 the highlands of Central Asia had in all probability been 

 the cradle of these races ; but there was very little evidence 

 to show that this theory was correct. The chief argument 

 used by those who supported it was based on the supposition 

 that Sanscrit is nearest of all the Indo-European languagey 

 to the primitive Aryan — a belief, however, for which the 

 evidence wa.s very slight. We can clearly trace back the 

 course of the Aryans into Lower India from the valley of 

 the Ganges, and into this region from the Punjaub, into 

 which region again they doubtless entered from the Hindoo 

 Koosh. But we can trace them no farther back. It is 

 true that the farther west of India we trace the language 

 the less original we find it, insomuch that we may fairly 

 infer that, while the Aryan Indians migrated to the south- 

 east, the Aryans of Persia and Asia Minor migrated west- 

 wards. For all these sections of the Indo-European race 

 we may find a cradle in the highlands of Central Asia 

 west of ilurtag and Belurtag. But we cannot conclude 

 safely from this that those highlands were the cradle from 

 which the whole Indo-European division of the human family 

 came. The Greek, the Roman, and the Romanic languages 

 may be referred to the same Central Asian source from 

 which the Persian or Iranian and the Sinscrit were derived, 

 and yet it would remain unproved that the Hungarian and 

 Lithuanian languages and dialects were derived thence, and 

 with doubt on this head would come in doubts as to all 

 forms of Teutonic and Celtic languages. 



Now the researches of Cuuo, Geiger, Schrader, and Penka 

 tend to show with constantly increasing force of evidence, 

 that the languages of Middle and Western Europe were 

 derived from regions lying north and east of these regions — 

 in other words, from the regions around the Baltic. The 

 Rev, Canon Taylor, in a paper of singular interest recently 

 read before the British Association, points out that the 

 evidence indicates the Baltic provinces of Russia, or what 

 we used in old times to call Finland, as the central region 

 from which the Aryan races sprei\d— one great division 

 travelling southwards and eastwards over the central high- 

 lands of Asia, to occupy India, Persia, and Asia Minor ; 

 another travelling southwards and westwards over Prussia, 

 Poland, Hungary, Germany, Denmark, Gaul, and the^ 

 British Isles. Each of these great divisions threw oft' 

 bi-anches in various direction.s, insomuch that we find the 



