Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/368

354 that tall blond people make their appearance sporadically among the Tadjiks of Persia and of Turkistan; that the Siah-posh and Galtchas of the mountainous barrier between Turkistan and India are such; and that the same characters obtain largely among the Kurds on the western frontier of Persia at the present day. The Kurds and the Galtchas are generally broad-headed, the others are long-headed. These people and the ancient Alans thus form a series of stepping-stones between the blond Aryans of Europe and those of Asia, standing up amid the flood of Finno-Tataric people which has inundated the rest of the interval between the sources of the Dnieper and those of the Oxus. If only more was known about the Sarmatians and the Scythians of the oldest historians, it is not improbable, I think, that we should discover that, even in historical times, the area occupied by the blond long-heads of Aryan speech has been, at least temporarily, continuous from the shores of the North Sea to central Asia.

Suppose it to be admitted, as a fair working hypothesis, that the blond long-heads once extended without a break over this vast area, and that all the Aryan tongues have been developed out of their original speech, the question respecting the home of the race when the various families of Aryan speech were in the condition of inceptive dialects remains open. For all that, at first, appears to the contrary, it may have been in the West, or in the East, or anywhere between the two. In seeking for a solution of this obscure problem, it is an important preliminary to grasp the truth that the Aryan race must be much older than the primitive Aryan speech. It is not to be seriously imagined that the latter sprang suddenly into existence, by the act of a jealous Deity, apparently unaware of the strength of man's native tendency toward confusion of speech. But if all the diverse languages of men were not brought suddenly into existence, in order to frustrate the plans of the audacious bricklayers of the plain of Shinar; if this professedly historical statement is only another "type," and primitive Aryan, like all other languages, was built up by a secular process of development, the blond long-heads, among whom it grew into shape, must for ages have been, philologically speaking, non-Aryans, or perhaps one should say, "pro-Aryans." I suppose it may be safely assumed that Sanskrit and Zend and Greek were fully differentiated in the year 1500 If so, how much further back must the existence of the primitive Aryan, from which these proceeded, be dated? And how much further yet, that real juventus mundi (so far as man is concerned) when primitive Aryan was in course of formation? And how much further still the differentiation of the nascent Aryan blond long-head race from the primitive stock of mankind?

If any one maintains that the blond long-headed people, among