Page:Hawaiki The Original Home of the Maori.djvu/80

68 races occupied N.W. India, while it is also certain that the Semitic variety of the same race, whether it be, or be not, the parent of the Iranian—must have been located in Western Asia from a still more remote period. The extreme antiquity of the Semitico-Iranian race in this province is established by its strongly distinctive physical characters, when compared with the purer African, Scythic and Dravidian; by the double evidence of the Semitic and Indo-Germanic linguistic formations; by the absence of this race and their formations (of language) in all other parts of the world, save in those in which they are intrusive; and by their immemorial occupation of the impregnable mountain homes of the Caucasians and the ranges to the eastward as far as the Hindoo-Kush. The question necessarily arises, could such a race have remained for thousands of years interposed between Africa and India without exercising any influence on the races and languages of these regions? It may be considered as established by a concurrence of physical, linguistic, artistic, and historical evidence that this race became predominant in the basin of the Nile at least four or five chiliads before the Christian era. It is not probable that the Aryans became predominant in the basin of the Ganges more than 2000 B.C. But it is equally improbable that a race which gave civilization and a ruling caste to Egypt 2000 to 3000 years previously, did not begin to affect the ethnology of India until this period. The preservation of such a race during so long a period of a rigid exclusion would be an ethnic anomaly. * * "

Page 37.—"The Aryan race appears to have begun to spread from the western side of the Jumna into the basin of the Ganges probably less than 4000 years ago. * * It is probable that the native races (i.e., Gangetic) were here—at an early period of the Aryan era—reduced to