TEANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 891 



German Frederick. The only point in which the later historical irruptions of the 

 Scandinavian peoples difiered from their prehistoric ones was, that while the later 

 irruptions were made Ly sea, the older were made by land. The sail was unknown 

 to the tribes of the north until the age of their intercourse with the Komans, 

 from whom they borrowed both the conception and the name of the sagidnm, or 

 ' sail.' The course of their migrations must have followed the valleys of the great 

 rivers. 



If southern Scandinavia is thus to be regarded as the original home of the 

 Aryan languages, and the race which first spoke those languages, and which we may 

 therefore call Aryan, is to be identified with the Scandinavian type, it follows that 

 the further south and east we advance from this primary starting-point the less 

 pure will the type become. It will be in the neighbourhood of that starting-point 

 and in northern Europe that we shall expect to find the largest number of un- 

 diluted Aryan languages and the purest examples of the Aryan breed. In C4reece 

 and Armenia, in Persia and India we must look for mixture and decay. And 

 such indeed is the fact. Mr. Wharton has found, by a careful analysis of the 

 Greek lexicon, that out of 2,740 primary words only 1,580 can be referred with 

 any probability to an Indo-European origin, while the prevailing racial type in 

 ancient as in modern Greece was distinctly non- Aryan. Indeed, I am inclined 

 to believe that the culture revealed by the excavations at Mykonte, Tiryns, and on 

 other prehistoric Greek sites belonged not to a Hellenic but to a pre-IIellenic 

 population, and that the Aryan Greeks first made their appearance in Hellas at the 

 epoch of what later tradition called the Dorian immigration. It was to the north 

 that Greek legends pointed as the primreval home of tlie Hellenic race and civilisa- 

 tion, and Dodona ever continued to be revered as the oldest sanctuary of the 

 Hellenic world. In India it is notorious that the Aryan-speaking Hindus entered 

 the country from the north-west, and failed to spread far into the burning plains 

 of the south. The date of their invasion is uncertain, but for myself I have grave 

 doubts whether it was earlier than the eighth or even the seventh century B.C. At 

 all events it was not until after the seventh century B.C., as we now know from the 

 express testimony of the cuneiform inscriptions of Van, that the Aryan-speaking 

 Armenians entered the land which now bears their name, and recent philological 

 researches have confirmed the assertion of Greek writers that the Armenians were 

 a colony of the Phrygians who had themselves emigrated from Thrace. Up to the 

 closing days of the Assyrian empire the monuments make it clear that no Aryans 

 had as yet settled between the Kurdish ranges on the east and the Halys on the- 

 west. 



But while the extension into Asia of what I will now, following Penka's ex- 

 ample, call the Aryan race, seems to be referred to a comparatively recent period, 

 there is a curious fact which goes to show that the same, or a closely allied, race 

 once spread along the northern coast of Africa. On Egyptian monuments, which 

 date back to the sixteenth century before our era, the Libyan tribes of this district 

 are described and depicted as white. Their descendants are still to be found in the 

 mountainous parts of the coast, those of Algeria being commonly known under the 

 name of Kabyles. I saw a good deal of them last winter, and must confess to being 

 greatly struck by their appearance. I had known, of course, that they belonged 

 to the white race and were characterised by blue eyes and light hair, but I was not 

 prepared to find that their complexion was of that transparent whiteness which 

 freckles readily and is supposed to mark the so-called red Kelt. They are dolicho- 

 cephalic, and as their skulls agree with those discovered in the prehistoric cromlechs 

 of Roknia and other places it is plain that their distinctive features are not due, 

 as was formerly supposed, to intermixture with the Vandals. 



The cromlechs in which they once buried their dead are quite as remarkable 

 as their physical characteristics. Cromlechs of a similar shape are found extend- 

 ing through Spain and western France to the northern portion of the British Isles. 

 Since dolichocephalic skulls occur in connection with them, while the physical 

 characteristics of the modern Kabyle resemble so strikingly those of a particular 

 portion of the modern Irish population, we seem driven to infer that the Kabyle and 

 the ' red Kelt ' are alike fragments of a race that once spread from Scotland and Ire- 



