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Show ALASI POOR ARYAN. Canon Thyior Ha Almost Demonstrated That He Never Existed. Max Muller and his school took it for granted too readily that the Aryan raca must have originated in Central Asia, and Bpread from thence to India in one direction, and to Europe in the other. They took it for granted, too, that Sanscrit San-scrit must necessarily approach more nearly to the primitive Aryan tongue than any other language of which remains re-mains have descended tons. The last ten years have seen the final overthrow of hoth these rongh-and-ready provisional provis-ional theories. Penke and his school have demonstrated, demon-strated, almost beyond the possibility ot doubt, that the Aryans ware rather 01 European than Asiatic origin; rather a northern or intermediate than a southern south-ern race. Evidence has been brought forward to show that Lithuanian approaches ap-proaches still more closely than Sansorit to the earliest form of the Aryan tonguej and now Canon Taylor comes to the front to convince ns that, of the two great prehistoric races of Europe, th 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 representative of the unmixed Aryan blood. The general result of this masterly and exhaustive survey for, brief and popr.-lar popr.-lar as it is, it deserves to be called both masterly and exhaustive will be to dethrone de-throne that almost mythical animal, our Aryan ancestor, from the pinnacle ol superiority on which he had been placed by the poetic fancy of fashionable Max Mulierism. It is hardly too much to say that Canon Taylor has demolished forever for-ever our Aryan ancestor the idyllic ancestor, an-cestor, that is to say, that we all knew and loved and were so inordinately proud of. His searching examination of tho neolithic culture shows us almost conclusively conclu-sively that the primitive Aryans were barbarians in a very early stage of nomad no-mad existence, nnaoquointed with metals, met-als, clad mainly in skins, dwelling by summer in huta and by winter in circular circu-lar roofed pits, but roaming for the most part in wagons with their flocks and herds over an immense area of sparse!; populated pastoral country. They were not advanced philosophers; they were pure minded poetical patriarchs; patri-archs; and they were rot immeasurably superior to all other competitors. Few things have been done in reconstruction-ary reconstruction-ary history to equal the interesting chapter chap-ter on the Neolithic Culture, in which our latest iconoclast proves bit by bit, and step by step, these two cardinal principles firrt, that the neolithic inhabitants in-habitants of Central Europe were, some of them at leaet, primitive "Aryans, and, secondly, that their civilization is shown by a hundred converging lines of evidence evi-dence to have reached only the simple and undeveloped level of a 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 If to be identified with the dolichocephalic or the brachycephalic type; that on the 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 voicr organ in non-Aryans who adopted witk variations) the dialect of their more cnl-tivated cnl-tivated neighbors, and, above all, that on the Aryan mythology, which almost completely pulverizes the supposed common com-mon pantheon and executes a delightful triumphal dance over the prostrate bodiec of the Vedic deities. Altogether, the book is a most wholesome whole-some protest against an undigested mass of unproved assumptions. ,The pendulum pendu-lum may possibly have swung for the moment a trifle too far in the opposite directioni but it is a great gain at least to have reduced 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 semi-civilized neolithic European herdsmen. Pall Mall Gazette. |
