Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/152

 138 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Spencer's First Principles and Facts and Comments, the latter being No. 13 and the last volume issued.

The present volume presents the results of the various researches in Indo-European ethnology, especially those of recent years, which have revolutionized the opinions of scholars in regard to the Aryan question, and advances a tentative theory in regard to the origin and diffusion of the Indo-Europeans and the Indo-European culture. After setting forth the data of the problem and its traditional solution, the writer discusses the inductions of philology concerning the proto- Aryan epoch, and then passes to a consideration of the results of anthropological investigation concerning the primitive inhabitants of Europe. He stands with the anthropologists rather than with the philologists, holding, with Broca Topinard and others, that a primitive unity of speech does not imply a primitive unity of race. The genesis of the Aryan language and culture, he says, is something quite different from the genesis of the anthropological type or types which constituted the people who spoke that language and possessed the Aryan culture. Finding a brachycephalic type present and preponderant in all the primary and secondary centers of Indo-European ethnology, he con- cludes that such a type was the principal, if not the only, propagator of Aryanism. In this he is partially in accord with Sergi, whose recent contributions to the Aryan controversy have attracted wide attention, but unlike Sergi he rejects in toto the whole Asiatic hypothesis. The brachycephalic type from which sprang the Aryan culture has been recognized with certainty in France, Belgium, Switzerland, in the Balkan regions and the countries of the Danube, and existed there long before the formation of the proto-Aryan people. The ancient home of our ancestors, then, according to this writer, is not in Bactria, as Professor Max Miiller and others long maintained, or in Scandinavia, as Penka contended, or in the Rokitno swamp, as suggested by Posche, but in Central Europe, which Cuno, as long ago as 1871, declared to be the cradle of the human race. The Urheimat, says our author, must have been between the Danube and the Volga, that is, in the eastern part of the middle zone of Europe. "The most probable conclusion," he says, " is that the evolution of the proto-Aryan language took place at some point in the median zone of the European continent, in a group of tribes, in which the brachycephalic element was certainly represented, and in which just as certainly were more or less of other elements of European ethnology, each of which brought its own con-