Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/284

260 side reaching up the slopes of the Paropamisan and Hindoo-Koosh, and on the other to the Armenian Highlands. This position gives us, mindful of the saying, ex oriente lux, a reasonable centre of development, and accords well with such historical facts as bear on the point. In respect of natural products and climatic conditions it lends itself to the deductions already drawn from the lists of most widely diffused terms. European centre has long been claimed for the Aryan dispersion, somewhere in South Russia, the Danube, the shores of the Baltic, and so on. This theory would make the proto-Aryans spring from the rude builders of the lake-dwellings and the kitchen-middens. It points to the absence of any common word for lion, tiger, elephant, camel, ape, as inimical to any Asiatic source. It says that the only common trees named, birch and beech, are natives of middle Europe not of Asia. Max Müller discusses the whole question, and replies to this argument on its own lines. There is no doubt that the prehistoric condition of middle Europe was unfavourable to the early growth of civilisation. In point of fact, when there at all, it came late and from the south. Dense forests covered a marshy land. The inhabitants must have been confined to the neighbourhood of lakes or of the sea, where alone were the means of easy subsistence. If, then, the dispersion was from such a centre, there ought to be a common word for fish, yet the Sans. matsya, and the Teut. and Celt. fish are from different radicals; common names for shells and shell-fish are entirely absent. The eel is not found in the Black or Caspian Sea, and the name, though from a common root, is of Western and later growth. The sea itself ought to, and does, have a common name, but this proves little. In Sans. maru is a desert, literally that which is dead, and Lat. mare and our mere and extensive Teut., Slav., and Celt. forms point to a Western development. Why, on this hypothesis, should the European Aryans forget in the East so prominent a natural environment as this? The name for ship, too, is common. It is Sans. nau, Gr. and Lat. naus, A.S. naea, and Ger. Nachen, a skill, from a root seen in nare, to swim or float. It primarily applies to a boat on a river or lake, and has not spread far in the Teutonic dialects. In bird life the crane is not in Sans. but in