Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/519

Rh Iberians, the next neighbors of the Ligurians, used the same forms of place-names as the latter, and that some of the words plainly exhibit Aryan terminations. Thus we may conclude that with the exception of the Basques, who are probably a non-Aryan spurt from North Africa, the melanochrous populations of Spain, Italy, the Balkan Peninsula, France, Britain, Ireland and Holland have from the first spoken none but an Aryan language.

(c) Only one argument is now left to the defenders of the non-Aryan theory. When the study of sociology first sprang up in the last century, it at once became a fundamental doctrine that the Aryans had always been strictly patriarchal, and that polyandry and descent through women was unknown amongst them. Though this view has received many rude shocks in later days, Professor Zimmer argues from it that the indigenous people of Britain and Ireland were non-Aryan.

It is well known from the ancient writers that the Picts were polyandrous and that succession was consequently through females. Again, it is certain, both from the ancient Irish literature and also from statements of external writers, that the Irish were polyandrous, and that they also almost certainly traced descent through women. Accordingly, Professor Zimmer infers that the indigenous race was non-Aryan. But McLennan has long since pointed out that descent through women was the ancient law at Athens, and I have just shown that the Athenians and Arcadians, the autochthonous, dark-complexioned people of Greece, never spoke any save an Aryan tongue. Moreover, I have shown elsewhere that the Ligurians, who are now generally admitted to have spoken always an Aryan language, had descent through women, whilst I have also pointed out that there is good evidence that the ancient Latins, who have generally been taken as typical Aryans, had the same system. Again, it is admitted that the ancient Illyrians and dark-complexioned Thracians spoke an Aryan language, which, inasmuch as it differed materially in certain ways from that spoken by their Celtic overlords, must have been aboriginal, whilst I have further given grounds for believing that the ancient Iberians (though not the Basques) were also an Aryan-speaking folk. But there is good evidence that the Illyrians, melanochrous Thracians and Iberians all traced descent through women. In view of these facts it is useless to urge that because the Picts of Scotland and the ancient Irish had that system of succession through females these peoples must have been non-Aryan.

We have now reviewed the three main criteria of race at present used by anthropologists: (a) pigmentation of the skin, hair and eyes; (b) the shape of the skull and other osteological characteristics; and finally, (c) their system of tracing descent. We have seen that osteological differences may be but foundations of sand, because it is certain