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THE ARYAN RACE.

sciously written the history of their race, just as the earth has written the history of the mutations which its surface has undergone, in the strata which now compose its outer crust.

The Aryans of Europe are the Celts, Greeks, Latins, Germans (Teuton and Scandinavian), Letts and Slaves. The only portions of its soil not possessed by them are those occupied by the Basques, Magyars, Turks, Finns, Laps, and some Ugrian and Tatar tribes of Russia.

In the act of tracing out the mutual affinities of the Aryan languages it was impossible to overlook the traditional beliefs, rites, and customs which those languages record. Hence the investigation gradually resolved itself into the two allied sciences of Comparative Philology and Comparative Mythology. Both sciences bear testimony to the primitive unity, mental and physical, of the whole Aryan family. Often is the same verbal root found underlying words and groups of words most dissimilar in appearance, and belonging to widely different languages, under circumstances that entirely preclude the hypothesis that it is in any one of them a borrowed possession. It is just the same with a multitude of beliefs and customs which have existed from time immemorial in Greece and in Scandinavia, in the

THE ARYAN RACE.

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Scottish highlands, the forests of Bohemia, and the steppes of Russia, on the banks of the Shannon, the Rhine, and the Ganges. Take any of them separately, as it appears among a single people, and it will rarely happen that we can penetrate very deeply into its meaning or the causes of its being. We shall even be in danger of too hastily attributing its origin to some arbitrary caprice of ignorance and superstition, just as fossil shells and bones have by some been supposed to have been so formed ab origine by a freak of nature. But the mystery clears up more and more as we examine the subject on all sides by the light of kindred phenomena; and in this way we are led on to many surprising and pregnant discoveries of the common elements out of which the mythical traditions of Greece, Italy, and the Northern nations have been severally and independently developed. In this way also the most trivial maxim or practice of modern superstition may become an important link in the chain of human history, taking that term in its most comprehensive sense. For "popular tradition is tough," and there are still extant among ourselves and elsewhere items innumerable of an ancient lore, transcending that of the school-master, and now only succumbing at last to the navvy and the steam

THE ARYAN RACE.

engine; a lore which remains unchanged at the core from what it was some thousands of years ago, ere the first Aryan emigrants had turned their steps westwards from their old home in Central Asia. The dog had been domesticated long before that event occurred, yet watch him now when he lies down to sleep. Though his bed be a bare board, or ground as destitute of herbage, he turns himself round and round before he lies down, just as his wild ancestors used to do before him, when they prepared their couch in the long grass of the prairie. With not less tenacity does the popular mind hold fast by the substance of its ancient traditions, and also for the most part with as much unconsciousness of their primary import.

Previously to the dispersion of the Aryans, their condition, as revealed by the languages of their several branches, was in the main nomadic and patriarchal, yet not without some beginnings of agriculture, and, in proportion thereto, some rudiments of a higher form of social life, some approach to a municipal polity.* Their stock of knowledge was what they had gathered for themselves during their passage from the savage state to that in which we here find them. The growth of their vocabulary

* Kuhn, Herabk. p. 1, and in Weber's Ind. Stud., i. 321–363.

THEIR PRIMITIVE VOCABULARY.

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had kept pace with the progress of their observation and experience, and was in fact an automatic register of that progress. It was a highly figurative vocabulary, for that is a necessary condition of every primitive tongue. In all stages of language, even in that at which it has become "a dictionary of faded metaphors," comparison is the ready handmaid of nomenclature. A piece of machinery, for instance, is called a spinning-jenny, because it does the work of a spinning woman. "To call things which we have never seen before by the name of that which most nearly resembles them, is a practice of every day life. That children at first call all men 'father,' and all women 'mother,' is an observation as old as Aristotle. The Romans gave the name of Lucanian ox to the elephant, and camelopardus to the giraffe, just as the New Zealanders are stated to have called horses large dogs. The astonished Caffers gave the name of cloud to the first parasol which they had seen; and similar instances might be adduced almost indefinitely. They prove that it is an instinct, if it be not a necessity, to borrow for the unknown the names already used for things known.” *

In this way the primitive Aryans composed their vocabulary of things seen in the sky, and so it

* Farrar "On the Origin of Language," p. 119.

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ARYAN MYTHS.

became for all succeeding generations an inexhaustible repertory of the raw material of myths, legends and nursery tales. The sun, for instance, was a radiant wheel, or a golden bird, or an eye, an egg, a horse; and it had many other names. At sunrise or sunset, when it appeared to be squatting on the water, it was a frog; and out of this name, at a later period, when the original metaphor was lost sight of, there grew a Sanscrit story, which is found also in German and Gaelic with a change of gender. The Sanscrit version is that "Bhekî (the frog) was a beautiful girl, and that one day, when sitting near a well, she was discovered by a king, who asked her to be his wife. She consented, on condition that he should never show her a drop of water. One day, being tired, she asked the king for water; the king forgot his promise, brought water, and Bhekî disappeared." * That is to say, the sun disappeared when it touched the water.

Clouds, storms, rain, lightning and thunder, were the spectacles that above all others impressed the imagination of the early Aryans, and busied it most in finding terrestrial objects to compare with their ever varying aspect. The beholders were at home on the earth, and the things of the earth were com

* "Saturday Review," Feb. 23, 1861.