Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/269

Rh inscriptions of Darius. Their Hindoo kinsmen pnshed beyond the country of the seven rivers into the Dakshin-aranya, or great southern forest of the Deccan, calling the aborigines blacks, just as in later ages Clive's soldiers knocked their high- caste descendants on the head as niggers. A great religious schism seems to have accentuated some original distinctions between the two peoples. The Sanskrit deva, a god, became in Zend a demon, while the Hindoos retaliated by making Asura a giant at war with the Vaidic gods. The Persians, on the other hand, put Asura (root, as, to be) in the place of honour, who then became the Ahura-mazda or Ormuzd of Zoroastrian dualism. But the Sanskrit grammarians had no difficulty in inventing a derivation for the word, namely, a not, and sura a god.

The proofs of the connection between this Asiatic and the former European unity form the very kernel of comparative philology. They are invaluable, not alone in the phonetic aspect of the question (Sanskrit and Zend range themselves, as far as Grimm's law is concerned, under the Classical or southern European group), but still more, and of far deeper import, in respect of the clue they afford to the difficult problems of comparative grammar and mythology. Suffice it here to say that Sanskrit explains the significance of the name Aryan as an eponym for the whole family. In the Vedas the Aryas are believers in the Vaidic gods in opposition to their Gentile enemies the Dasyus. Later, it meant belonging to the three upper castes, and especially the third or cultivators of the soil. Its root is seen in Lat. ar-are, and English ear, to plough. The name points to that immemorial custom which loves to dignify a nation or a family by associating its origin with the possession of land, and proves the early existence of that Aryan earth-hunger which reaches its acme in Ireland, the Erin that is said to be just another form of the common race-name.

No one can ever venture to conjecture when all these races existed as a primitive unity, or why they broke up, or in what order, or whence sprung the initiative for that dialectic growth to which they owed their phonetic differences. But we have learned to know and distinguish the various branches of the stock, and to formulate the law under which all comparisons of them, one with another, must be studied. It remains now to