INDUSTAN). The evidence on which a family relation has been established among these nations is that of language. Between Sanscrit (the mother of the modern I I indn dialects of Hindustan). Zend (the language of the ancient Persians), Greek (which is yet the language of Greece), Latin (the language of the Romans, and the mother of the modern Romaine Impinges, i.e., Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Wallachian), Celtic (once the language of great part of Europe, now confined to N4 ales and some parts of Ireland and Scotland), Gothic (which may be taken as the ancient type of the Teutonic or Germanic languages—including English—and of the Scandinavian), and Slavonic (spoken in a variety of dialects all over European Russia and a great part of Austria), the researches of philology have within the present century established such affinities as can he accounted for only by supposing that the nations speaking them had a common origin. No one of these nations, whether existing or historical, can claim to be the parent nation of which the others are colonies. The relation among the languages mentioned Is that of sisters—daughters of one mother, which perished, as it were, in giving them birth. No monuments of this mother-language have been preserved, nor have we any history or even tradition of the nation that spoke it. That such a people existed and spoke such a tongue is an inference of comparative philology, the process of reasoning being analogous to that followed in the kindred science of geology. The geologist, inter preting the inscriptions written by the finger of nature herself upon the rock-tablets of the earth's strata, curries us back myriads of ages before man appeared on the scene at all, and enables us to be present, as it were, at creation itself, and see one formation laid above another, and one plant or animal succeed another. Now languages are to the ethnologist what strata are in geology; dead languages have been well called his fossils and petrifactions. By skillful interpretation of their indications, aided by the light of all other available monuments, he is able to spell out, with more or less probability, the ethnical records of the past, and thus obtain a glimpse here and there into the gray cloud that rests over the dawn of the ages.
When these linguistic monuments are consulted as to the primitive seat of the Aryan nations, they point, as almost all ethnologists are agreed, to Central Asia, somewhere probably east of the Caspian, and north of the Hindu Kush and Paropamisan mountains.
There, at a period long anterior to all European history—while Europe was perhaps only a jungle, or, if inhabited at all, inhabited by tribes akin to the Finns, or perhaps to the American Inclines—dwelt that mother-nation of which we have spoken. From this center, in obedience to a law of movement which has continued to act through all history, successive migrations took place towards the north-west. The first swarm formed the Celts, who seem at one time to have occupied a great part of Europe; at a considerably later epoch came the ancestors of the Italians, the Greeks, and the Teutonic peoples. All these would seem to have made their way to their new settlements through Persia and Asia Minor, crossing into Europe by the Hellespont, and partly, perhaps, between the Caspian and the Black sea. The stream that formed the Slavonic nations is thought to have taken the route by the north of the Caspian. At a period subsequent to the last north-western migration, the remnant of the primitive stock would seem to have broken up; part poured southwards through the passes of the Himalaya and Hindu Kush into the Punjab, and became the dominant race in the valley of the Ganges; while the rest settled in Persia, and became the Medes and Persians of history.
It is from these eastern members that the whole family takes its name. In the most ancient Sanscrit writings (the Veda), the Hindus style themselves Aryans; and the name is preserved in the classic Aril, a tribe of ancient Persia, Aria, the modern Herat, and Ariana, the name of a district comprehending the greater part of ancient Persia, and extended by some so as to embrace Bactriana, Ariana, or Airyana, is evidently an old Persian word, preserved in the modern native name of Persia, Aii'an, or Iran. Arya, in Sanscrit, signifies "excellent," "honorable," being allied probably to the Greek ari(stos). the hest. Others connect it with the root ar (Lat. arare, to plough), as if to distinguish a people who were tillers (carers) of the earth from the purely nomadic Turanians or Turks.