8D0 REPOET— 1887. 



rude agriculture, though tlie art of grinding corn was as yet unknown , and crushed 

 spelt was eaten instead of bread ; while the community to wliich he belonge<i was 

 essentially that of pastoral nomads, who changed from season to season the miserable 

 beehive huts of wattled mud in which they lived. They could count at least as far 

 as a hundred, and believed in a multitude of ghosts and goblins, making offerings 

 to the dead, and seeing in the bright sky a potent deity. 



In calling the speaker of the Aryan parent speech the primitive Aryan I must 

 not be supposed to be prejudging the question as to the particular race to which he 

 belonged. This is a question which has recently been handled with great ability 

 by an Austrian anthropologist — Dr. Karl Penka. In a remarkable book, published 

 at the end of last year, he endeavours to substantiate the hypothesis advanced in an 

 earlier work, and to show that the first speakers of the Aryan languages were the 

 fair-haired, blue-eyed, light-complexioned dolichocephalic race, which is still found 

 in its greatest purity in Scandinavia ; that it was this race which in the neolithic 

 period spread southwards, imposing its yoke upon subject populations, like the 

 Norsemen and Normans of later days, and carrying witli it the dialects, which after- 

 wards developed into the Aryan languages ; and that, finally, it was the same race 

 which in the remote days of the palseolithic age inhabited western and central 

 Europe, where it has left its remains in the typical skulls of Cannstatt and Engis. 

 Dr. Penka would ascribe to its long residence in the semi-arctic climate of palaeo- 

 lithic Europe the permanent blanching of its skin and hair — a form of albinoism 

 which Dr. Poesche in 1878 endeavoured to explain by the climatic conditions of 

 the Rokitno marshes in Rassia, where he placed the cradle of the white Aryan 

 race. 



It cannot be denied that all the probabilities are at present on Dr. Penka's side, 

 so far as his main contention is concerned. Without denying that the speakers of 

 the Aryan parent speech may have already included slaves or wives of alien race, 

 it is probable that the majority of them were of one blood. They formed a single 

 community, nomad it is true, and therefore less likely to mix with foreigners, but 

 still sufficiently a single community to speak a language the several dialects of 

 which were so alike as to be mutually intelligible. In the social condition in which 

 the speakers were, and in an age when the waste lands of the world were still 

 extensive, the greater part of such a community must necessarily, we should think, 

 have belonged to the same race. The evidences of language, moreover, as we have 

 seen, point to a cold and northerly climate as tlie original seat of the community ; 

 and since they further inform us that the beech was known to it, we may conclude 

 that this climate lay westward of Konigsberg and Russia. Penka has striven to 

 show that the animals whose bones or shells are found in the Scandinavian kitchen- 

 middens are just those whose names are common to the Indo-European languages, 

 or at all events the European section of the latter. Now, the skulls disinterred 

 from the prehistoric burial-places of Denmark and the southern districts of Sweden 

 and Norway are, for the most part, identical with the skulls still characteristic of the 

 Scandinavian population where they accompany a fair skin and light hair and eyes. 

 By combining these two facts we arrive at the conclusion that the fair Scandinavian 

 race is the modern descendant of the race which spoke the parent language of the 

 primitive Aryan community, and left traces of itself in the Scandinavian kitchen- 

 middens. The conclusion is supported by the testimony of history. On the one 

 hand, we have the testimony of classical writers that the Aryan-speaking Kelts of 

 the Christian era were not the dark small-limbed population which now occupies 

 the larger part of France, but men of large stature, with the blue eyes and fair 

 hair of their Teutonic brethren ; while the ideal specimens of humanity conceived 

 of by the aristocratic art of Italy and Greece were the golden-haired Apollo and 

 the blue-eyed Athene. On the other hand, it was from Scandinavia that in later 

 times other bands of warriors poured forth, who made their way into the countries 

 of the Mediterranean, and even Asia, and established themselves as conquering 

 aristocracies in the midst of subject populations. The Kelts succeeded in reaching 

 Asia Minor, the Scando-German hordes overthrew the Roman empire, the North- 

 men established themselves from Russia on the east to Iceland and Greenland on 

 the west, and the Normans made Sicily their own long before the days of the 



