Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/267

Rh Toy, toque, a bonnet. "I wadna been surprised to spy You on an auld wife's flannen toy."—"To a Louse."

"There is no Aryan race in blood, but whoever, through the imposition of hands, whether of his parents or his foreign masters, has received the Aryan blessing, belongs to that unbroken spiritual succession which began with the first apostles of that noble speech, and continues to the present day in every part of the globe. Aryan, in scientific language, is utterly inapplicable to race. It means language and nothing but language; and if we speak of Aryan race at all, we should know that it means no more than x + Aryan speech." Thus does Professor Max Müller tell us that in attempting to reconstruct an ideal social unity for the Aryan race we must not look for aid to ethnology. The question is one which concerns the continuity of speech not of blood, an inheritance of mental attitude towards the world of spiritual and natural phenomena within and without us far subtler and profounder than any perpetuation of the characteristics of complexion and feature; for an Aryan speech writes its own history in virtue of those inherent principles which govern its growth and decay, or rather regeneration—principles which, by reason of their persistency of type and uniformity of action, alone go far to prove in this case a primitive social unity. What those principles are it is not my object either to investigate or prove, but rather to show how those mutual affinities, which are known to exist within a European unity of tongues, and connect themselves again with a certain well-marked Asiatic unity, point to a time when the makers of those tongues dwelt somewhere together, and developed a common civilisation whose leading characteristics are stamped upon Aryan progress down to the present day.

If we exclude, on the one hand, the Magyars of the Hungarian plain and the Osmanli of Turkey—both the remains of an irruption from Asia within the historic period—and, on the other, the prehistoric Basques of the Pyrenees and the nomadic Lapps and Finns of the northern mark, we find that all the