Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/505

Rh are now generally believed, as held by Latham, to have originated in upper central Europe. Yet, although the view respecting the cradle of the Aryans has changed, anthropologists have not seen the important bearing that it has upon the problem of neolithic man. The Aryans are generally held to have had a blond complexion.

As our discussion must from its nature concern itself with questions of race, let us first examine the criteria by which anthropologists distinguish one race from another. If you ask an anthropologist how he distinguishes an Aryan from a non-Aryan race, he will tell you that he relies on three main tests: (a) the color of the skin, hair and eyes; (b) the shape of the skull and certain other osteological characteristics; and (c) the system of descent through males. Formerly language was included in the tests of race, but when it was pointed out that the Negroes of Jamaica speak English, those of Louisiana French, henceforward it was assumed that one race can embrace the language of another with the greatest ease. Yet it may turn out, after all, that language was too hastily expelled from the criteria of race. On the other hand, we may find that too implicit faith has been placed on the three criteria of cranial characteristics, pigmentation and law of succession.

(a) As it is assumed that all Aryans were blond and traced descent through males, so it is held that all Europeans, who are dark-complexioned, and whose forefathers traced descent through women, are non-Aryan in race, and that, although they now in almost every case speak an Aryan tongue, this is not their primitive speech, but simply that learned from their Aryan conquerors. According to this orthodox view, the dark-skinned inhabitants of Italy, Spain and Greece are all non-Aryan, and all have borrowed the language of their masters, whilst, of course, the same is held respecting the melanochrous population of France and of the British Isles. Ever since Professor Sergi comprehended under what he terms the "Eurafrican species" all the dark-complexioned peoples of southern and western Europe, as well as the Semitic and Hamitic peoples of western Asia and northern Africa, the doctrine that the dark-skinned peoples of Europe once spoke a non-Aryan tongue or tongues is supposed to have been finally established. But under his Eurafrican species Sergi includes the blond race of northern Europe who speak Aryan languages along with the dark races who speak non-Aryan tongues. It is argued that as all the dark-skinned peoples on the north side of the Mediterranean belong by their physical type to the same original stock as the Semites and Hamites, they must likewise have spoken non-Aryan languages. Yet it might as well be maintained that the Finns, who speak a non-Aryan tongue, and the Scandinavians, who speak an Aryan, were originally all of one stock, because both races are blond.