Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/650

634 in the reindeer period. No doubt these fossil races, modified by intercrossing and other causes, persisted up to present times.

In this connection it may be well to refer briefly to the contention now prevailing as to the origin and original habitation of the ancestors of the present inhabitants of Europe. This subject, very interesting, is full of difficulties, which open it up to speculation and give full play to that class of scientists whom Prof. Huxley has called the Uhlans of science. Philology seems to take precedence in these investigations. The long-recognized similarity in the so-called romance languages—French, Italian, and Spanish—led Sir William Jones, about a century ago, to point out the alliance between Sanskrit, Zend, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Slavonian, German, Celtic, etc. Inasmuch as the similarity of French, Italian, and Spanish would be unintelligible if it were not for Latin, so the relation between all of the above named tongues is unintelligible without a root tongue and a people who spoke it.

At first this honor was given to Sanskrit and the inhabitants of the valley of the Ganges. Subsequent investigations demonstrated that Zend and Sanskrit were modifications of an IndoIranian tongue, of which Zend and Sanskrit were offshoots. Then the region of the Hindu Koosh and Pamir was thought to be the original seat; this idea crystallizing, as it were, long held sway. As the people spread northwest into Europe and southeast into India, they were called the Indo-Germanic race, and have now come to be called the Aryan race, said to be the name by which the Persians and Hindus knew themselves before their separation.

More recently speculation as to the original seat of the Aryans has, we might say, run wild. Russia, Finland, the shores of the Baltic, Scandinavia, and the Caucasian region all have or have had their advocates. The claims made for the Caucasian region and Russia appear to be the most plausible. They are, moreover, to some extent complementary to each other.

For the first locality the principal reason advanced is philological. It is held that the root language would necessarily contain names for the familiar objects of the environment. As there appear to be no words in Aryan to represent certain animals—camel, lion, and tiger—it is supposed these forms did not exist in the locality; being unknown to the people, they had no names for them. Hence, by studying the confines of animal life, a locality where the unnamed life did not exist would fill the linguistic requirement. The Caucasian region is said to do this. This reasoning is, however, of the negative kind, and is open to the objections that all negative reasoning is.