780 HEPORT— 1889. 



4. Further Researches as to the Origin of the Aryans} 

 By Canon Isaac Tayloe, Litt.D., LL.D. 



The author began by briefly referring to the paper on the subject which two years 

 ago he read at the Manchester meeting of the British Association. In that paper he 

 gave an account of the history of opinion during the last fifty years, and showed 

 that, while the scholars of the last generation were nearly unanimous in thinking that 

 the Aryans had migrated from Asia, there was now an equally pronounced tendency 

 to believe that they had originated in Europe. He also stated his own belief that 

 the fundamental agreement between the Aryan and Ugro-Finnic languages, both in 

 their grammatical structure and their verbal roots, could only be explained by the 

 hypothesis that Aryan speech had been evolved out of some language of the Ugro- 

 Finnic class. 



This paper had been met by the argument that the physical type of the Ugro- 

 Finnic race was so wholly different from that of the Aryans that it was impossible 

 to believe that the one could be connected with the other by descent. German 

 scholars, more especially Posche and Penka, had contended that the primitive 

 Aryans belonged to the tall, fair, blue-eyed, and dolicho-cephalic type, now repre- 

 sented by the Scandinavians and North Germans; while French writers were 

 inclined to the belief that the primitive Aryans were short, swarthy, black-eyed, 

 and brachy -cephalic. The Germans, in short, claimed the primitive Aryans as 

 typical Germans ; the French claimed them as typical Frenchmen. Each accused 

 the other of subordinating the results of science to Chauvinistic sentiment. A 

 controversy had arisen in' the Times, in which Sir John Lubbock and Professor 

 Bryce had taken a prominent part, as to the race-type of our own islands, the 

 issue of which seemed to be that in Great Britian both types are found in not un- 

 equal proportions. Englishmen therefore may claim to be able to discuss the 

 question of the race-type of the Aryans without being biassed by Chauvinistic 

 prejudices. 



The author said that, under these circumstances, he had now re-examined the 

 whole question from the anthropological rather than from the philological point 

 of view. 



Assuming that there had been no migration of any new race into Europe since 

 the neolithic period, he contended that anthropologists have established the exist- 

 ence in Europe of four distinct prehistoric races, which might be reasonably con- 

 nected with four existing types, which occupied nearly the same regions as the 

 four prehistoric races. 



We have : — 



(1.) The tall Northern dolicho-cephalic race, the Canstadt race of De Quatre- 

 fages, which is the Scandinavian race of Penka, and the Eguisheim race of other 

 writers. It is represented by the Stsengenses skeleton discovered by Nilsson in i\ 

 shell mound in Sweden, and may probably be identified with the race of the 

 Danish kitchen middens. The stature of this race amounted to 5 feet 10 inches. 

 It was platy-cephalic, prognathous, and dolicho-cephalic, with a mean cephalic 

 index of from 70 to 73. This is the race which, somewhat modified in its extreme 

 characteristics during the lapse of ages, is represented in Burgundian, Frankish, 

 and Anglo-Saxon tombs, and is to be identified with the row-grave type of Ecker, 

 which is believed to be Swabian and Alemannic. The only pure descendants of 

 this race are the North Germans and the Swedes. From the statements of classical 

 writers we may believe that the ancient Germans and Anglo-Saxons, like the 

 existing Swedes, were bhie-eyed, white-skinned, with abundant curly fair hair, 

 flaxen or golden, and ample beard. This Scandinavian or North-German type is 

 maintained by Penka and other German writers to represent the primitive Aryans, 

 who conquered the other European races and imposed on them their own Aryan 

 speech. 



(2.) We have a second type, also dolicho-cephalic, called the Silurian type by 



' Published in extenso in ' The Origin of the Arj-ans,' in vol. iii. of the Contempo- 

 rary Science Series. 



