readable. The impression left upon my mind, at that time, by various conversations about the "Sarmatian hypothesis" which my friend wished to subsitute for the Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir speculation, was that the one and the other rested pretty much upon a like foundation of guess-work. That there was no sufficient reason for planting the primitive Aryans in the Hindoo Koosh, or in Pamir, seemed plain enough; but that there was little better ground, on the evidence then adduced, for settling them in the region at present occupied by western Russia, or Podolia, appeared to me to be not less plain. The most I thought Latham proved was, that the Aryan people of Indo-Iranian speech were just as likely to have come from Europe, as the Aryan people of Greek, or Teutonic, or Celtic speech from Asia. Of late years, Latham's views, so long neglected, or mentioned merely as an example of insular eccentricity, have been taken up and advocated with much ability in Germany as well as in this country—principally by philologists. Indeed, the glory of Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir seems altogether to have departed. Prof. Max Müller, to whom Aryan philology owes so much, will not say more now, than that he holds by the conviction that the seat of the primitive Aryans was "somewhere in Asia." Dr. Schrader sums up in favor of European Russia; while Herr Penka would have us transplant the home of the primitive Aryans from Pamir in the far East to the Scandinavian Peninsula in the far West.
I must refer those who desire to acquaint themselves with the philological arguments on which these conclusions are based to the recently published works of Dr. Schrader and Canon Taylor;[1] and to Penka's Die Herkunft der Arier, which, in spite of the strong spice of the Uhlan which runs through it, I have found extremely well worth study. I do not pretend to be able to look at the Aryan question under any but the biological aspect; to which I now turn.
Any biologist who studies the history of the Aryan question, and, taking the philological facts on trust, regards it exclusively from the point of view of anthropology, will observe that, very early, the purely biological conception of "race" illegitimately mixed itself up with the ideas derived from pure philology. It is quite proper to speak of Aryan "people," because, as we have seen, the existence of the language implies that of a people who speak it; it might be equally permissible to call Latin people all those who speak Romance dialects. But, just as the application of the term Latin "race" to the divers people who speak Romance languages, at the present day, is none the less absurd be-
- ↑ Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples. Translated by F. B. Jevons, M. A., 1890. Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, 1890.
