260 DR J. MUIR'S account OF THE 



thus been made clear that the connection of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin is 

 even more intimate than had at first been imagined, but it has been further shown 

 that these three languages are united to the old Persian, the Teutonic, the Sla- 

 vonian, and perhaps the Celtic, tongues, by radical and structural resemblances 

 which prove that they all belong to the same stock. 



But, as a rule, affinity in language proves affinity in race. It is true that this 

 proposition does not hold good in all circumstances. It sometimes happens that 

 a superior and conquering race imposes its language on an inferior nation, which 

 thenceforward employs a form of speech either entirely or partially distinct from 

 that of its ancestors. But there is no reason to suppose that those tribes, them- 

 selves warlike, enterprising, and comparatively civilised, which conveyed to India, 

 to Persia, and to the shores of the Mediterranean, respectively, the earliest forms 

 of the Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, and Latin dialects, were at the commencement 

 of their history subjected to any such action of alien races as could have robbed 

 them of their hereditary languages. AVe may therefore presume, with every ap- 

 pearance of reason, that these several tribes carried with them to their new homes 

 the same forms of speech as had been employed by their forefathers, with no 

 greater modifications than are wrought in all languages by the lapse of time. 

 Assuming, then, in the absence of any evidence to the contrar}^ that, in the case 

 before us, affinity in language proves affinity in race, we may fairly conclude that 

 the Sanskrit-speaking Hindus, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Teu- 

 tonic and Slavonian nations, are all descended from the same stock. The common 

 ancestors of these various races must of course have spoken one common language, 

 now long extinct, from which the several cognate idioms, Sanskrit, old Persian 

 or Zend, Greek, Latin, and so forth, were offshoots. By no other supposition than 

 this of such common ancestors, using such a common form of speech, can we 

 account for the relations which we find to exist between those different languages. 

 The country occupied by the common ancestors of the nations in question appears 

 to have been Central Asia. This is the conclusion to which the most intelligent 

 scholars have been conducted by considering the positions which the different 

 races speaking the cognate languages severally occupied at the dawn of history. 

 As at that early period we discover the Sanskrit-speaking race in India, the 

 Zend-speaking race in Persia, the Greeks and Latins in Southern, and the Teu- 

 tonic tribes in Central Europe, it is most natural to suppose that these various 

 nations radiated, in the direction of their several homes, from a central point more 

 or less nearly equidistant from those different countries ; and this condition is 

 best fulfilled by Central Asia, the region which I have named. 



This theory, when applied to the forefathers of the Hindus, implies that they 

 immigrated into India from the north-west ; and this conclusion is strongly con- 

 firmed by the fact that the geographical references in the oldest part of Indian 

 literature, the hymns of the Rigveda, indicate that at the early period when they 



