Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/384

346 as the Hindoos, Greeks, Teutons, and others did. If this probability is considerable, then to insist on the fact that there is no positive evidence to show the existence of the custom amongst the Russians is simply to trade on our ignorance. It becomes, therefore, essential to endeavour to estimate the amount of this probability. Are we to lay it down as an invariable rule, admitting of no possible exceptions, that every pro-ethnic custom must necessarily have been inherited and preserved by every Aryan nation until and long after it had settled in the region which it has occupied since the dawn of history? I imagine no one would attempt to maintain such a proposition. We may here again glance at Comparative Philology: so far from being a rule, it is rather the exception to find that words, which undoubtedly occurred in the original language, have left representatives behind in every Aryan language; and though the life of a word is much more precarious than that of a custom, still it would be extravagant and in contradiction of observed facts to maintain that customs do not also perish. It seems to me, therefore, we have no right to assume that a pro-ethnic custom was more likely than not to survive in any given Aryan nation simply because it was admittedly a pro-ethnic custom. On the other hand, it would be inconclusive to argue that because a nation does not now possess a custom, therefore it never did. But, avoiding these two extremes, I think we may say that the absence of a custom is a presumption rather against than for the supposition that it once existed. Accordingly the probabilities will be rather for than against the supposition that the customs last mentioned go back to the pro-ethnic period of the Finnish-Ugrian race as well as to that of the Aryans. But if we once go so far as to draw this conclusion, we must go a good deal further, and claim as pro-ethnic a good many customs which in the first instance, and for fear of basing our argument upon unsafe ground, we provisionally admitted to be loans effected in historic times. If the Mordwins inherited from their pro-ethnic forefathers the same custom that the Russians inherited from their Aryan ancestors, it is only to be expected that the likeness between the customs of the two peoples would be sufficiently great to suggest borrowing in ethnic times. Thus the fact that the Russians possess a certain custom as well as the Mordwins or Wotjaks no