Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/349

 ASPECTS OF THE ARYAN QUESTIOA' 335

by the extension through historical events of local idioms over large territories and the choking off of various less fortunate dialects which had equally sprung from the common Latin base.

With this theory, a result largely of the old wave doctrine of Smidt and others, is associated a complementary explanation of the increasing simplification of idioms. The destruction of forms is due to the development of a kind of jargon in coun- tries where conquest superposes peoples speaking dialects too diverse for mutual comprehension, and in families where the father and the mother do not speak the same language.

It is by such arguments that the philologists have come to abandon the theory of the origin in Bactria of both the Aryan peoples and the Aryan languages and civilization.

REGION OF ORIGIN.

As I have indicated above, the philologists are today pretty well agreed to regard central Europe as the region in which has occurred the evolution of the Aryan languages and institutions. There exist, indeed, several other opinions, but some of these have been abandoned and the others have not been received with favor. Of these opinions the two most serious are those which place the origin of the Aryan culture respectively in southern Russia and in Scandinavia. The first of these views rests on the fact, generally admitted, that the early Aryans were nomad and pastoral peoples, and this manner of life naturally develops on the steppes rather than in a forested country such as central Europe. This argument, however, neglects climatic changes. It is easy to reply that just as the great Hercynian forest, highly developed at the commencement of our era, covered what were formerly steppes, so the impenetrable forests where the Gauls and Germans struggled in the historic period may very probably not have existed five or six thousand years before our era. The Scandinavian hypothesis errs by confusing two separate prob- lems : the origin of the Aryan civilization, and the origin of the dolicho-blond race considered as the Aryan par excelloice. We shall see that this race developed in the Scandinavian region, in the lowlands of the North Sea and the Baltic, but at the epoch