rtly of Asia, an analysis
of which would extend this paper too far into other fields; but apart
entirely from the question of myths or traditions, there are various
actual observed phenomena both of language and writing, especially in
Central Asia, which do not fit into any of the ordinary theories, and
which do suggest this, as a simple linguistic conclusion. In point of
locality, at least, the conclusion agrees with the usual "Aryan home"
theory; but as far as concerns this latter it must be remembered that
however fully it demonstrates the unity of the Aryan race, beyond that
fact all questions of dates and even of the state of civilization at the
time, are not matters of history as yet for us, but only of theory--as
to which our present "perspective" may be once more as faulty as it has
often been heretofore.[62-*]

I believe that this center of transition lay somewhere in Central Asia,
to the north of the great Himalayan range. That this region was a sort
of alembic, a melting-pot (as America is today) for various peoples of
an ancient world-wide culture, as broad at least in its scope as the
term Aryan is today. That this culture displayed the ideographic traits
we have discussed, and that it has left more or less definite traces at
different places in the world. That it covered the two Americas, in
whatever continental form they may then have existed, leaving us there
"les debris echappes a un naufrage commun." That coincident with a new
and universal world-epoch, as wide in its cultural scope as the
difference between the ideographic and literal, there was finally formed
a totally new vehicle for the use of human thought, the inflectional,
literal, alphabetic. That this vehicle was perfected into some great
speech, the direct ancestor of Sanskrit, into the _forms_ of which were
concentrated all the old power of the ancient hieroglyphs and their
underlying concepts. For Sanskrit, while the oldest is also the
mightiest of Aryan grammars; and no one who has studied its forms, or
heard its speech from educated native mouths, can call it anything but
concentrated spiritual power. That the force which went on the one hand
into the Sanskrit forms, was on the other perpetuated on into the
special genius of Chinese, in which, as we know it, we have a retarded
survival, not of course of outer form so much as of method and essence.
And in Tibetan, in spite of all that is said to the contrary, I suspect
that we have a deriv