derived from a common source, were ipso facto regarded as standing in the same relation to a common parent-race as did the languages they spoke to a common parent-language; and, as a consequence of this assumption, the primitive Aryan speech' and the 'primitive Aryan people' were for a time credited severally, and in a precisely equal degree, with being the ancestors of the derived Aryan languages and races. An Aryan cradle-land,' the supposed birthplace of all the Aryan-speaking races, was figured as situated somewhere in Central Asia; and from thence this race, after leaving behind it its Persian and Hindu contingents, was supposed to have advanced westwards in successive migratory waves, sweeping all the earlier inhabitants of Europe before it. The apparent simplicity and completeness of this theory had much to recommend it, and for a time it reigned supreme; and it was only with the further progress of ethnology that its conclusions, at least in their extreme forms, ceased to be regarded as final. Europe, as ethnological evidence now went to show, had even in the earliest neolithic times been peopled with races all exhibiting affinities with those of the present day, and possessing cultures of which there are many surviving traces; and it became the task of the ethnologist accordingly, even whilst recognizing philology as an indispensable ally, to establish serious modifications of conclusions which were adopted hastily and on philological grounds only. For the ethnologist, the term ‘Aryan,' or Indo-European,' becomes one whose significance is not, so far as any present races of men are concerned, ethnical, but linguistic merely. The 'primitive Aryan race' figures in his eyes, not as the mother of all Aryan-speaking peoples, but simply as that particular offset of the Caucasic stock within which the primitive Aryan or Indo-European speech attained its development; and the Aryan cradle-land,' similarly, is no longer the common birthplace of Persian and Hindu, Roman and Teuton, Celt and Slav, but only the special locality within which a single highlygifted prehistoric race completed the earlier stages of its evolution. The explanation of the apparent anomaly which thus ensues, of linguistic, unaccompanied in the same degree by racial, inheritance, is found by Professor Keane in the want of parity which, on strictly physiological grounds, exists between the conditions of racial and those of linguistic stability. For, as he says, let it be granted that a highly-specialized type form, such as that represented by the genus homo, had had but one single centre of development, and it follows almost necessarily that such racial differences as may appear within it will be those of different varieties merely, not those of different species. And it is in virtue of this specific unity which exists between them, that the various human races do, as a matter of fact, fuse readily whenever they are brought into contact. The With language, on the other hand, this is not the case. Primitive language, unlike primitive man, was not, to begin with, a highly-developed species-a terminal form, too completely organized in a single direction to again diverge very widely. Language had its birth, not with potential humanity as a whole, but with the development only of the human organs of speech; and in all probability it must have remained still in its infancy till long after the first human groups had dispersed themselves. The development of language, therefore, it may be said, did not begin until that of its speakers, so far as specific characters went, was practically finished. linguistic inheritance common to the whole human race, being thus one of formless and plastic sounds only, there was nothing to hinder the structural development of these in the most opposite and mutually exclusive directions—and this quite apart from accompanying racial variation; and it is upon this crucial difference between the potentialities of human speech on the one hand, and of human races on the other, that Professor Keane insists, as serving to explain the wide discrepancies which may be found existing everywhere, between racial and linguistic boundaries. Stock races, he maintains, are able to amalgamate with one another, because they are varieties only of a single species; but stock languages refuse to do so, because their structural differences exceed the limits within which such amalgamation is possible. A language may and does borrow words of another language, but not the methods of this language in dealing with them; for the words which it borrows it makes its own, and, by treating them after its own fashion, sets its own linguistic seal upon them. It is precisely this persistence however, possessed by language over race, which, while disqualifying it for saying the last word on questions of ethnical distribution, yet gives it a special ethnological value of its own; and enables the student by its aid to detect the presence of ethnical elements, which might otherwise have altogether escaped him. Thus, for instance, while there is no people of whom we can now say with certainty that it correctly represents the original Aryan type, we can say, with every likelihood of being right, that there is no Aryan-speaking people that has not been, in some degree, permeated by a strain of Aryan blood; and, furthermore, that wherever a non-Aryan language, such as Basque, for instance, is found surviving in the midst of an Aryan-speaking population, we may regard it with equal confidence as the surviving token of the presence of non-Aryan blood, not only in the particular district thus marked out, but over a much wider surrounding area. Professor Keane, following Professor Huxley and Professor Schrader, is inclined to locate the original birth-place of the Aryan race (not as has been persistently done by the exclusively philological school) on the high table-land of Central Asia, but rather in the Eurasian Steppe country, which extends from the River Dnieper to the region north of Turkestan. The inhabitants of this district, at any rate all through the long Pleistocene period, would have been cut off, as Huxley pointed out, from intermixture with the Mongoloid populations of Eastern Asia, by the inland sea which formed so efficient a barrier from very early times between the progenitors of the white and of the yellow races; and such a circumstance would have been undoubtedly favourable to the production both of linguistic and racial peculiarities. On this theory the subsequent Aryan migrations must have extended not to the westward only, but to the eastward also of the original Aryan habitat, and it would have been by the drying up, within comparatively recent times, of the waters which once covered the central Asian depression, from the Black Sea to the foot of the Altai Mountains, that the route through Turkestan to Persia and India would have been first laid open. The interest attaching to the place of the Aryan cradle-land is not, however, mainly a geographical one. The question of its situation is chiefly important from the light which an answer might possibly throw on the acquisition, by the original Aryan race, of those unique qualities which have made it so potent a factor in the subsequent history of mankind. "The Evolution of the Aryan,' by the late Herr Rodolph von Ihering, of which an English translation has recently been brought out, is a book which may be accurately described as a 'study in speculative archæology. In spite, however, of its speculative form, and of much that is both loose and fanciful in its inferential methods, it is a book which appears to us, when taken in connexion with the point which has been last mentioned, to contain matter that is at once suggestive and interesting. The more purely scientific aspects of the problems here dealt with are, perhaps not unnaturally, overlooked by a writer whose standpoint is almost exclusively that of the jurist and historian. But the importance attaching to conditions of early existence, and their influence in determining the destinies of races, are fully recognized. The deductions which have been drawn by philological methods, methods, as to early Aryan surroundings and modes of life, from the organic elements of primitive Aryan speech, are accepted by Herr von Ihering pretty much as he finds them, and from them he selects those whose bearing on his own main thesis, the existence of an Aryan Migration Period,' he proceeds to demonstrate. These are race. (1) The essentially pastoral character of the primitive Aryan (2) Its complete, or almost complete, ignorance of agriculture. (3) Its residence, not (after the manner of the Semitic races) in permanently built houses and cities of brick and stone, but in temporary and easily constructed shelters.' Seeing that the Aryans were thus a nation of herdsmen, he then proceeds to argue, the practice of wandering far and wide in search of pasturage for their cattle would have always been familiar to them; and since they spent neither time nor labour in the construction of permanent centres of habitation, and had but little to expect from a soil which they did not know how to till, they possessed neither the interests of the citizen nor those of the farmer to bind them to their native land. Whenever the growth of numbers might require it, therefore (and in a pastoral community this would happen much oftener than in an agricultural one), bands of adventurers would always have been ready to set forth in quest of subsistence elsewhere. And it is in the chronic aptitude for migration thus arising, and in the conditions of life which racial migration extending over long periods of time would have imposed, that Herr von Ihering traces the growth of certain special qualities which, though often (as apparently in the present instance) by no means incompatible with a state of civil and domestic barbarism, are yet at the same time a sine quâ non to either the creation or the maintenance of any of the higher types of civilization. Discipline, resource, endurance-the military virtues par excellence-these, he argues, would have been necessitated, and therefore induced, by a life habitually carried on under martial law, and in the midst of hostile surroundings. It is to the possession of qualities thus acquired at the sword's point that in Herr von Ihering's opinion the racial ascendancy of the Aryan element is owing, and in the hardships and dangers of the distant Aryan Wanderjahre' he thus sees a remote preparation for the unique part which has been since played by the Aryan-speaking races in the world's history. ART. ART. VI.-The Poems of Bacchylides, from a Papyrus in the British Museum. Edited by Frederick G. Kenyon, M.A., D.Litt., Hon. Ph.D. in the University of Halle, Assistant in the Department of Manuscripts, British Museum. Printed by order of the Trustees of the British Museum. London, 1897. A GAIN the land of surprises, the proverbial home of plagues, pyramids, and now of papyri, justifies nobly her ancient reputation. It is just seven years since we* congratulated the British Museum on its splendid gift to the world of letters, when it published from certain Egyptian papyri a very ancient and valuable treatise on the Constitution of Athens,' which many (indeed most) scholars believe to be the work of Aristotle. We now owe to the cultured enterprise and antiquarian insight of the same eminent institution a very substantial portion of the work of a poet to whom the Alexandrian critics gave a place among the nine lyric bards of ancient Hellas, and of whom we have till now had but a few scanty fragments-due chiefly to chance, not selection-about a hundred lines, and these, as we can now see, by no means characteristic of the mind and art of their author. In the case of the present find, there is no room at all for the slightest doubt about the authenticity and genuineness of the recovered treasure; and hardly anything could be more interesting than the various literary and archæological aspects of these odes exhumed from a sepulture of nearly a millennium and a half. There is evidence that the poems of Bacchylides survived in some form till about 500 A.D., but since that date,' writes Dr. Kenyon, 'we have no certain warrant that any eye has seen a complete poem of Bacchylides for a space of fourteen hundred years.' If we justly congratulated the British school of classics seven years ago on its achievement in deciphering and editing the 'Constitution of Athens,' still more hearty felicitations are due on the present performance. The editio princeps is well worthy of the great traditions of English classical learning. Dr. Kenyon shows his former erudition, acuteness, and marvellous skill in deciphering; but, beside these high qualities, he has brought to bear on his present task gifts of pure scholarship, of which we certainly saw but little evidence seven years ago; and he has had by his side some of the most accomplished scholars of England and Ireland. Great as have been the services of Professor Jebb to learning, we doubt if he has ever given more incontestable proofs of his kinship with the spirit of Greek No. 344, April 1891. poetry |