The Arizona champion., 1891-03-21
ALAS! POOR ARYAN.
Demonstrated That he Never
 Existed.
WHAT GAHoN TAYLOR SAYS ABOUT HIM.
A Race of Barbarians. Mass of Un-
 proved Assumptions.

Max Muller and his school took it for granted too readily that the Aryan race must have originated in Central Asia, and spread from thence to India in one direction, and to Europe in the other. They took it for granted, too, that San scrit must necessarily approach more nearly to the primitive Aryan tongue than any other language of which re- mains have descended to us The last ten years have seen the final overthrow of both these rough-and-ready provis- ional theories.
 Penke and his school have demon strated, almost beyond the possibility of a doubt, that the Aryans were rather of European than Asiatic origin; rather a northern or intermediate than a south ern race. Evidence has been brought forward to show that Lithuanian ap- breaches still more closely than Sanscrit to the earliest form of the Aryan tongue; and now Canon Taylor comes to the front to convince us that, of the two great prehistoric races of Europe, the primitive Aryan is to be identified rather with the smaller, darker and broad headed type than with the taller, fairer and long skulled Scandinavians who have been almost always accepted till quite lately as the purest representatives of the unmixed Aryan blood.
 The general result of this masterly and exhaustive survey-for, brief and popu- lar as it is, it deserves to be called both masterly and exhaustive be to de- throne that almost mythical animal, our Aryan ancestor, from the pinnacle of superiority on which he had been placed by the poetic fancy of fashionable Max Mullerism. It is hardly too much to say that Canon Taylor has demolished for ever our Aryan ancestor-the idyllic an cestor, that is to say, that we all knew and loved and were so inordinately proud of. His searching examination of the neolithic culture shows us almost conclu- sively that the primitive Aryans were barbarians in very early stage of no mad existence, unacquainted with met als, clad mainly in skins, dwelling by summer in huts and by winter in circu- lar roofed pits, but roaming for the most part in wagons with their flocks and herds over an immense area of sparsely populated pastoral country.
 They were not advanced philosophers; they were pure minded poetical patri- archs; and they were not immeasurably superior to all other competitors. Few things have been done in reconstruction ary history to equal the interesting chap ter on the Neolithic Culture, ill which our latest iconoclast proves bit by bit, and step by step, these two cardinal principles-first, that the neolithic in- habitants of Central Europe were, some of them at least, primitive Aryans, and, secondly, that their civilization is shown by a hundred converging lines of evi- and undeveloped level of pastoral tribe in its stone age.
 Hardly less valuable than this are the chapters on the Aryan race, in which our author discusses with perfect candor and freedom from bias or prejudice the question whether the primitive Aryan is to be identified with the dolichocephaic UT IuS pldCly CtpLlotIlC y pc, IlldG Oh tIlC evolution of Aryan speech, in which he traces in great part the origin of the various languages into which the Aryan tongue split up in its diffusion to racial or local peculiarities of voice and voice organ in non-Aryans who adopted (with variations) the dialect of their more cul- tivated neighbors, and, above all, that on the Aryan mythology, which almost completely pulverizes the supposed com mon pantheon and executes a delightful triumphal dance over the prostrate bodies of the Vedic deities.
 Altogether, the book is most whole some protest against an undigested mass of improved assumptions. The pendu- lum may possibly have swung for the moment a triie too far in the opposite direction; but it is a great gain at least to havereduced our Aryan ancestor from the exalted and incongruous position of a sort of primitive breechless Oxford don to something like prosaic and average equality with the general run of semi civilized neolithic European herdsmen Pail Mall Gazette.