122 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [August, 



the different subjects of comparative philology, in order to show 

 the descent of a great number of words of various languages from a 

 Sanscritic source — from which it is inferred that the very varied 

 races of people who spoke or still speak them are all of x\rian origin. 

 So that at length, the Indo-European hypothesis embraces as of one 

 family the races of Europe and of India, i, e. the Brahmans, Kshatriyas 

 and Vaisyas, with many intervening links. With recipients of this 

 hypothesis all contradictory facts are at once silenced by the very 

 position we have already quoted from Sir William Jones, that the 

 languages " cannot be examined without believing them to have 

 sprung from some common source." The conclusion alluded to is 

 arrived at by transposing the argument from the subject of language 

 to human races ; if the languages had a common source, the people 

 who have spoken, or who now speak them, are all intimately allied. 

 The fact of the connection of or affinity in the languages is to a certain 

 extent undeniable, but probably it admits of a rational and consistent 

 explanation very different from the received one. 



We do not venture to go into the question of the' truth of so 

 universally admitted a hypothesis as that of the Indo-European, for 

 we are fully aware that great numbers of able and learned men in 

 India are engaged in working out its details, and are daily discovering 

 what are considered firm proofs of its validity. We shall limit ourselves 

 to the suggestion, whether we can look with so much confidence upon 

 the truth of this grand hypothesis, if there be good reason to conclude 

 that the human race, instead of having had its cradle in Armenia, in 

 any portion of Central Asia or elsewhere, and being left to its own 

 inadequate struggles to diffuse itself all over the habitable globe, is, 

 in the main, an aggregate of families formed by the hand of the 

 Creator, in every different locality in which it is found, and each 

 constituted by that wise Providence for the climate and productions 

 with which it is surrounded. 



A very distinguished physiologist, the favourite disciple of Blumen- 

 bach, Professor K. A. Rudolphi, long since pointed out that " a single 

 human pair was certainly not fitted to people the whole earth. A 

 wild animal or a disease equally might have defeated the object. 

 This is not the way in which nature goes to work. In so important 

 an affair as the peopling of the earth by men, she could not possibly 



