22 2 The Races of the Danube. [xi. 



because their mode of life obliged them to roam over 

 vast areas in quest of the means of subsistence. The 

 profound philology of the present day has shown that 

 the Aryans, while still in their primitive Asiatic home, 

 and long before they had become distinguishable as 

 Kelts, Graeco-Italians, Teutons, Slavs, or Indo-Per- 

 sians, had advanced beyond the hunting and exclu- 

 sively pastoral stages of barbarism, and acquired a 

 subsistence partly by tilling the soil and partly by 

 the rearing of domestic cattle. They possessed even 

 houses and inclosed towns, and the rudiments of what 

 Mr. Bagehot calls " government by discussion " were 

 not wholly unknown to them. The picture of society 

 with which we are familiar in the Germania of Tacitus 

 and in the Homeric poems represents a condition 

 of things in many respects similar to that which 

 obtained among the primitive Aryans. In these 

 respects they differed widely from the savage Tataric 

 hordes which molested them on the east, and to 

 whose attacks, as well as to the unmanageable 

 increase in their own numbers, we must probably 

 ascribe their gradual and long-continued migrations 

 into Southern Asia and into Europe, When after 

 many centuries those less-civilised Aryans known as 

 Germans and Slavs were driven into collision with 

 their more-civilised brethren of the Roman Empire, 



