1098 The American Naturalist. [November 
methods now in use are good, but phonograph records are easier to 
make and more satisfactory. While the collection of many cylinders 
on which the language, songs, and similar records are made is only a 
means to an end, it is a practical and efficient way for immediate 
preservation. The scientific study of these records comes later, but 
now is the time for collection of them. Edison has given us an in- 
strument by which our fast-fading aboriginal languages can be rescued 
from oblivion, and it seems to me that posterity will thank us if we 
use it to hand down to future students of Indian languages this addi- 
tional help in their researches. —J. WALTER FEwkEs, Boston, October 
4, 1890. 
The Aryan Cradle-Land.—‘‘ It will be for the benefit of our 
science,’’ said the president of the Anthropological Section of the British 
Association, “that speculations as to the origin and home of the 
Aryan family should be rife; but it will still more conduce to our 
eventual knowledge of this most interesting question if it be consist- 
tently borne in mind that they are but speculations.’’ With the latter, 
no less than the former, opinion I cordially agree. And as in my 
address on the Aryan cradle-land, in the Anthropological Section, I 
stated a greater variety of grounds in support of the hypothesis of 
origin in the Russian steppes than has been elsewhere set forth, I trust 
that I may be allowed briefly to formulate these reasons, and submit 
them to discussion. 
(1) The Aryans, on our first historical knowledge of them, are in 
two widely-separated centers,—Transoxiana and Thrace. To Transoxi- 
ana as a secondary center of dispersion the Eastern Aryans, and to 
Thrace as a secondary center of dispersion the Western Aryans, can 
with more or less clear evidence, or probable inference, be traced 
from about the fourteenth or perhaps the fifteenth century B.C.; and 
the mid-region northwest of Transoxiana and northeast of Thrace— 
and which may be more definitely described as lying between the 
Caspian and the Euxine, the Ural and the Dnieper, and extending 
from the forty-fifth to the fiftieth parallel of latitude—suggests itself 
as a probably primary centre of origin and dispersion. 
(2) For the second set of facts to be considered reveal earlier white 
races from which, if the Aryans originated in this region, they might 
naturally have descended as a hybrid variety. Such are the facts 
which connect the Finns of the north, the Khirgiz and Turkomans of 
the east, and the Alarodians of the south, with that non-Semitic and 
non-Aryan white stock which have been called by some Allophyllian, 
but which, borrowing a term recently introduced into geology, may, I 
