Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/346

 332 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

THE ARYAN CONTROVERSY.

In a work full of brilliant errors, Lectures on the Science of La?igiiage (1861), Max MiJller asserted that there was a time when the ancestors of the Hindus, of the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Slavs, the Celts, and the Germans lived under the same roof. This idea of a patriarchal family of Aryans, the ancestral stock of the various Aryan peoples, the home of their languages and institutions, gained widespread acceptance. In the early sixties it was the prevailing view. It is still to be found in some works of vulgarization, and is still taught in some institutions of learning which have become hospitals for all kinds of infirm and invalidated doctrines.

The conception was very simple, too simple to correspond with the complicated data of history and science. It supposed that, as the tribe of Aryans increased and their language devel- oped, groups detached themselves; and so, one group crowding another, they spread over a vast area the language and institu- tions that prevailed among them at the period of their separation.

Lytton (Zanoni, 1842) and Omalius d'Halloy {Bui. Ac. de Belgique, 1848, XV, 549). It implies a different conception of the problem, and reasons thus : The Aryan being dolicho-blond, and the dolicho-blond being of European origin, the origin of the Aryan peoples must be sought in Europe. This thesis, sustained by Latham in the preface of his edition (1851) of the Germania of Tacitus, was, therefore, no longer a new doctrine when it was brilliantly developed by Cl^mence Royer at the Congress of Anthropology of 1872 and the Congress of the Anthropological Sciences at the exposition of 1878. From that time the leading exponent of this view has been Penka, the advocate of the hypothesis of the origin of the dolicho-blonds and of the Aryan civilization in Scandinavia. The principal works of Penka are : Origins aryacir, Vienna, 1883; Die Herkunft der Arier, Wenna, 1886; "Die arische VrzeH," Aus/and, 1890,741-4,764-74; "Die Entstehung der arischen Rasse," .4!(j/aKi/, 1891, 132-6, 141-5, 170-4, 191-5; "Die alten Vblker der bstlichen Lander Mitteleuropas," Globus, 1892, LXI, n. 4-5 ; " Die Heimat der Germanen," Mitt, der Anthr. Gesellschaft in Wien, 1893, XXIII, Heft 2; " Zur Palaoethnologie Mittel- und Siideuropas, ibid.,
 * 897, XXVII, 19-52.

This hypothesis of Scandinavian origin was earlier propounded by Wilscr at the meeting on December 29, 188 1, of the Archieological Society of Karlsruhe {Karlsruher Zeilung, January 22, 18S2). Wilser has published a considerable number of articles upon this question, the most recent being "Stammbaum der arischen Volker," A'a/Kr- wissenschaftliche Wochenschrift, 1898, XIII, 361-4.

Even before Wilser's advocacy of the Scandinavian hypothesis, Latham had modified his earlier theory of the origin of the Aryans in central Europe. Still regarding the latter as the region in which the Aryan civilization developed, he came