OUR ANCESTOBS. 219 



themselves from valley to valley, like the North 

 American Indians of later days a fairer and taller 

 race was growing up unnoticed away to the east, 

 among the great central table-lands of the Asiatic 

 plateau. This fair-skinned, yellow-haired, and blue- 

 eyed folk is known to us by the somewhat fanciful 

 name of Aryans ; and from it the chief conquering 

 peoples of the whole Eastern hemisphere are derived. 

 The Aryans spoke a language whose nature we can 

 infer from the numerous modern dialects derived from 

 it ; and this language enables us in part to form some 

 conception of the state of culture attained by the 

 people who used it. In their earliest known condition, 

 while they still all lived together among the high plains 

 of Asia, they were hardly, if at all, superior in the 

 arts of life to the Euskarians of Britain. They were 

 ignorant of the use of metals, and armed only with 

 weapons of polished stone. They fed their flocks like 

 the semi-nomad tribes which still inhabit the same 

 region, and they tilled a little grain of some coarse 

 cereal kind. Altogether, if we regard them with 

 calmly impartial eyes, and not with the excessive 

 filial piety of some German thinkers, we shall probably 

 be forced to admit that the primitive Aryans were, on 

 the whole, about as good and as bad as most other 

 barbaric peoples at the same period of the world's 

 history. Stronger than the neighbouring nations 

 they certainly showed themselves to be, but wiser or 

 better there is no sufficient reason to suppose that they 

 were. 



