The Louisiana Democrat. [volume] (Alexandria, La.) 1845-1918, 1889-04-03
THE ARYAN RACE.
Scientific Speculations Concerning Its
Origin and Character.


Origin and Character.
When it was first discovered that
most European nations spoke Ian
guages of the Aryan Cor Indo-Persian)
stock, the conclusion was at once
drawn that these European Aryans
must look for their ancestral home in
the East. As no one doubted that all
the nations of this stock had sprung
from one source, it was natural to in
quire in what place the primitive
Aryan tribe had it's original seat 1t
was natural also to adopt the view
that this seat was to be found some
where in that portion Of Central Asia
to which the traditions embodied,
however vaguely, in the earliest
known compositions of Aryan origin,
tho Vedas and the Zend-Avesta,
seemed to point. This region, which
comprehends ancient Persia and
Bactria, has. from the earliest times of
which we have any knowledge, been
the home of Aryan communities. The
reasons for accepting it as the pecul-
lar seat of the race seemed con-
elusive to ethnologists until a
very recent date. Of late years some
scholars of high rank. both in Ger
many and in England, have been led to
adopt the suggestion, first made by the
late eminent English philologist, DR..
Latham, that the Aryans may have
been of European origin. Their argu-
ments were we'll summed up in the in
teresting address delivered last year
before the Section of Anthropology in
the British Association by the presi-
dent of the section, Prof. Sayce. They
have since been fully considered and
discussed by Prof. Max Muller in his
recent work, Biographies of Words,
and the Home of the Aryans." His
decision is that to which the great ma
jority of ethnologists have long since
given their assent, namely, that the
pleponderant weight of argument
points to an Asiatic home for the race.
Some of the grounds for this conclu-
sion will presently be shown, but, in
the first instance, it becomes neces-
sary to fix the locality of this primitive
seat somewhat more definitely than it
is placed in Prof. Max Mullers essay.
He finds that the Aryan home must
have been somewhere in ASIA" but
declines to say more.
This conclusion, it is evident, is too
indefinite for science; nor does it seem
likely that the learned author, if he
had cared to be more precise, would
have had any difficulty in drawing a
much narrower limit. The ''method
of elimination" is easily sufficient for
this end. From the whole of Asia we
strike out at once, by the common con-
sent of ethnologists, its eastern third,
comprising China, Japan and Thibet,
and along with it, by like consent, the
three great southern peninsulas, the
Indo-C Chinese, the Indian and the Ara
bian. With Arabia the rest of the an
cient Semitic countries, Mesopotamia,
Syria and Phnnicia, will be erased
from the problem. The immense ex-
panse of Siberia will also disappear;
for, though one bold speculator has
sought a frigid home for the early
Aryans in that region, he has, as might
be supposed. gained no adherents to
his theory. No one proposes Asia
Minor; and Armenia and the Caucasus
seem put out of the question by the fact
that our earliest historical knowledge
of those regions shows them inhabited
mainly by non-Aryan tribes. -Horatie
Hale, in Popular Science Monthly.