guished author of
that theory has seemed to favor this view. Yet, in fact, the development
theory has nothing to do with the question. If we suppose that the
existing and--so far as we know--the only species of man appeared upon
the earth with the physical conformation and mental capacity which he
retains at this day, we make merely the same supposition with regard to
him that we make with regard to every other existing species of animal.
How it was that this species came to exist is another question altogether.

Philologists regard it as an established fact that the first people who
spoke an Aryan language were a tribe of barbarous nomads, who wandered in
the highlands of central Asia. Those who have studied the earliest
products of Aryan genius in the Vedas, the Zend-Avesta, and the Homeric
songs, will be willing to admit that these wandering barbarians may have
had minds capable of the highest efforts to which the human intellect is
known to have attained. Yet if an irruption of Semitic or Turanian
conquerors had swept that infant tribe from the earth, no trace of its
existence beyond a few flint implements, and perhaps some fragments of
pottery, would have remained to show that such a people had ever existed.
Have we any reason to doubt that in the course of all the ages, in
various parts of our globe, many tribes of men may have arisen and
perished who were in natural capacity as far superior to the primitive
Aryans as these were to the races who surrounded them? Under the law of
the survival of the fittest, it is not the strongest that survive, but
the strongest of those that are placed in the most favorable
circumstances. On any calculation of probabilities, it will seem likely
enough that among the numberless small societies of men that have
appeared and vanished in primeval Asia and Europe, in Africa, Australia,
America, and Polynesia, there may have been some at least equal, if not
superior, in mental endowments, to that fortunate tribe of central Asia,
whose posterity has come to be the dominant race of our time. Among
their leaders may have been men qualified to rank with the most renowned
heroes, exemplars, and teachers of the human race--with Moses and Buddha,
with Confucius and Solon, with Numa, Charlemagne, and Alfred, or (to come
down to recent times) with the greatest and wisest among the founders of
the American Republic. If the possibility of the existence of such men
under such conditions can