and encroaching Aryans, into districts either so
sterile or so mountainous and strong, that it was too worthless or too
difficult to follow them further--their remnants being represented at
the present day by the Laps, the Basques, and the Esths. Philological
Archaeology has further demonstrated that the vast populations which now
stretch from the mouth of the Ganges to the Pentland Firth,--sprung, as
they are, with a few exceptions only, from the same primitive Aryan
stock,--all use words which, though phonetically changed, are radically
identical for many matters, as for the nearest relationships of family
life, for the naming of domestic animals, and other common objects. Some
of these archaic words indicate, by their hoary antiquity, the original
pastoral employment and character of those that formed the parental
stock in our old original Asiatic home; the special term, for example
(the "pasu" of the old Sanskrit or Zend), which signified "private"
property among the Aryans, and which we now use under the English
modifications, "peculiar" and "pecuniary"--primarily meaning
"flocks;"[9] the Sanskrit word for Protector, and ultimately for the
king himself, "go-pa," being the old word for cowherd, and consecutively
for chief herdsman; while the endearing name of "daughter" (the duhitar
of the Sanskrit, the [Greek: thygater] of the Greek), as applied in the
leading Indo-European languages to the female children of our
households, is derived from a verb which shows the original
signification of the appellation to have been the "milker" of the cows.
At the same time the most ancient mythologies and superstitions, and
apparently even the legends and traditions of the various and
diversified Indo-European races, appear also, the more they are
examined, to betray more and more of a common parentage. Briefly, and in
truth, then, Philological Archaeology proves that the Saxon and the
Persian, the Scandinavian and the Greek, the Icelander and the Italian,
the fair-skinned Scottish Highlander, and his late foe, the swarthy
Bengalee, are all distant, very distant, cousins, whose ancestors were
brothers that parted company with each other long, long ages ago, on the
plains of Iran. That the ancestors of these different races originally
lived together on these Asiatic plains "within the same fences, and
separate from the ancestors of the Semitic and Turanian races," is (to
quote the words of Max Mueller), "a fact as firmly establish