The Russellville Democrat., 1889-03-28
THE ARYAN RACE.
Scientific SpecuIations Concerning It's lOrigin and Character.

Scientific specuIations Concerning Its Origin and Character.
 When it was first discovered that most European nations spoke lan- 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 It 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 Aryau origin, the 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 1t as the pecul- far seat of the race seemed con elusive to ethnologists until a very recent date. or 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 well 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 eponderant 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 Muller's essay. He finds that the Aryan home must have been somewhere in Asia" but declines to say moro.
 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, it's eastern third, comprising China, Japan and Thibet, and along with it, by like consent, the three great southern peninsulas, tho Indo-Chinese, the Indian and the Ara bian. With Arabia the rest of the an cient Semitic countries, Mesopotamia, Syria and Phpnicia, will be erased from the problem. The immense ex- panse of Siberia will also disappear; for, though one bold speculator has sought 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. -Horatio Hale, in Popular Science Monthly.