OUK EACE AND ITS OEIGIN. 
83 
racter of language, too, is greatly affected by climate and 
local circumstances. It is not tbe skin only which changes 
colour with change of place, but the voice and its tone as 
well. 
The evidence of language is irrefragable, and it is the 
only evidence worth listening to with regard to pre-historic 
periods. It would have been next to impossible to discover 
any traces of relationship between the swarthy natives of 
India and their conquerors, whether Alexander or Clive, but 
for the testimony borne by language. What other evidence 
could have reached back to times when Greece was not 
peopled by Greece, nor India by Hindus ? What authority 
would have been strong enough to persuade the Grecian 
army that their gods and their hero ancestors were the same 
as those of King Porus, and convince the English soldier 
that the same blood was running in his veins and in the 
veins of the dark Bengalese ? And yet there is not an 
English jury which, after examining the hoary documents of 
language, would reject the claim of a common descent and a 
legitimate relationship between Hindu, Greek, and Teuton. 
Many words still live in India and in England that have 
witnessed the first separation of the Northern and Southern 
Aryans. The terms for God, for house, for father, mother, 
son, daughter, for dog and cow, for heart and tears, for axe 
and tree, identical in all Indo-European idioms, are like the 
watchwords of soldiers.* 
When it is considered how many causes are continually 
working together to change and alter everything in nature, 
the chemical processes and combinations which are ever 
going on, the great wonder is that man is not more changed 
and diverse one from another than he is, and, therefore, in 
spite of difference of colour and other peculiarities, there is 
still such a wonderful amount of identity between man and 
man, from whatever part of the globe he may come, and of 
whatever colour he may be, as plainly proves all have 
originally sprung from one and the same source. That 
widely separated and dispersed as he is, cut off from those 
* Max Muller’s “History of Ancient Sanscrit Literature" p. 13. 
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