Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/344

330 a designation for the entire race in question. I prefer the term Aryan to either of the others, because it has gained considerable currency during the last twenty years, and because it has been given a general significance by the philologists, and so by the reading public.

It is, however, as is shown by the history of the word, far from being a satisfactory term.

In the sacred books of India and Persia the word Arya designated the parent stock of the Iranians and the Hindus. From Arya the philologists derived the term Aryan to indicate the linguistic group and the special civilization of the peoples of this ethnic branch. Students came to regard all the Indo-European languages as derived from a more primitive Aryan spoken in the region of Bactria, and all the Indo-European peoples as descended from the Aryan stock, which is supposed to have swarmed all over Europe and a part of Asia.

In this conception, which was the prevailing one until recent years, there is much more of error than of truth. The Indo-Iranian group was not the parent stock of the Indo-European peoples, the Indo-European peoples did not come from central Asia, and the elements of which they are composed are of various origin and without any other ties than a certain community of languages and institutions.

Under these conditions it is not exactly a happy idea to choose the name of the Aryan branch as a general designation for the languages and institutions of the Indo-European peoples. It would be equally appropriate if, in the future, when all memory of present history is lost, philologists and ethnographers should designate what we now call the Anglo-Saxons by the term Tasmanians, because of the discovery in Tasmania of some traces of Anglo-Saxon institutions or literature.

Upon this deceptive generalization has been grafted a special doctrine still more confusing. Most scholars and specialists who regard the Aryans as having originated in Europe think that the development of the Aryan language and primitive culture occurred among a dolicho-blond people, or, at least, among a people whose controlling elements were dolicho-blond. Hence