visible in the
growth of the fruits of the earth; moreover, some of their tribes were
ruled by priests, while others stood under the patriarchal rule of the
head of the clan or family. All this reminds one of the nomads, the
Brahmanic Aryas of old under the sway of their Rishis, to whom were
subject every distinct family or clan. While the Pelasgians were
acquainted with the art of writing, and had thus "a vast element of
culture in their possession before the dawn of history," we are told (by
the same philologists) that our ancestors knew of no writing until the
dawn of Christianity!

Thus the Pelasgianic language, that "most barbarous language" spoken by
this mysterious people, what was it but Aryan; or rather, which of the
Aryan languages could it have been? Certainly it must have been a
language with the same and even stronger Sanskrit roots in it than the
Greek. Let us bear in mind that the Aeolic was neither the language of
Aeschylus, nor the Attic, nor even the old speech of Homer. As the
Oscan of the "barbarous" Sabines was not quite the Italian of Dante nor
even the Latin of Virgil. Or has the Indo-Aryan to come to the sad
conclusion that the average Western Orientalist will rather incur the
blame of ignorance when detected than admit the antiquity of the Vedic
Sanskrit and the immense period which separated this comparatively rough
and unpolished language, compared with the classical Sanskrit, and the
palmy days of the "extinct Aryan tongue?" The Latium Antiquum of Pliny
and the Aeolic of the Autochthones of Greece present the closest
kinship, we are told. They had a common ancestor--the Pelasgian. What,
then, was the parent tongue of the latter unless it was the language
"spoken at one time by all the nations of Europe--before their
separation?" In the absence of all proofs, it is unreasonable that the
Rik-Brahmanas, the Mahabharata and every Nirukti should be treated as
flippantly as they now are. It is admitted that, however inferior to
the classical Sanskrit of Panini, the language of the oldest portions of
Rig Veda, notwithstanding the antiquity of its grammatical forms, is the
same as that of the latest texts. Every one sees--cannot fail to see and
to know--that for a language so old and so perfect as the Sanskrit to
have survived alone, among all languages, it must have had its cycles of
perfection and its cycles of degeneration. And, if one had any
intuition, he might have seen that what the