Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/402

396 mythology, which, twenty years ago, was going to give us the key to all the mythologies. Judging from Dr. Schrader’s results, the key has broken in the wards. He declines to grant a single god common to the whole of Aryan-speaking peoples.

The resemblances in names are reduced to two or three notably Zeus = Dyaus, and these are explained away without the resort to the hypothesis of a common worship of the early Aryans. Thus, of the great mythological myth of the sixties one great stronghold is taken. The Aryans had no common gods. Dr. Schrader is even so heretical as to deny that they ever had a common home, and certainly not in Asia. This is a theme taken up with great skill by Canon Taylor, whose lucidity is a pleasant contrast to Dr. Schrader’s painstaking piling up of materials for a book. Canon Taylor adds to the subsidiary aids of philology the use of anthropology. His craniology strikes one as somewhat amateurish, but his ethnological treatment of the subject brings out the main thesis of his book with great skill. This I take to be that the Aryan tongue was imposed upon the peoples now speaking Aryan by conquest, and was not a common possession of six or seven sets of races. In short, there was only one Aryan race and tongue, and the latter has been passed on to various races by conquest. Authorities are disagreed as to the Ur-Aryans: some are for the Scandinavians, some for the Celts. Canon Taylor himself has a brief for the Letts; but all seem to agree that there was never such a thing as a common Aryan race from whom Celts, Teutons, etc., “swarmed off” as they increased in numbers. The whole outcome is a remarkable lesson against precipitate decision in such inquiries. Twenty years ago we could all have sworn that the original home of the Aryans was in Asia, that they were all of one blood, that they had a common culture and worship, and that they passed into Europe westwards. All this was presented to us with such confidence, eloquence, and insistence, that denial seemed ignorant presumption. Now all this is changed, and great is the