The Cradle of the Human Race

AT some time in the remote future there will be a modest historian of the remote past.

He will commence and conclude his account of the cradle of the human race by saying that he does not in the least know what it was, nor where it was situated, nor when the race quitted it. He will spend as little time upon the Meru of the Hindus as upon Mount Parnassus, the Ararat of Deucalion, or upon the centres of creation which are believed in by the Patagonians. He will not weary himself with superintending the migrations of all the peoples of Europe from a region in Central Asia where now no European peoples dwell, nor ever have dwelt since the dawn of history. He will begin his world-chronicle by admitting that the grand divisions of humankind have from time immemorial held substantially the same habitats which they hold at present, or at least held until the colonization of America.

Having thus humbly avowed his ignorance, he will immediately be rebuked for his presumption. Theologians, who suppose that a failure to affirm is equivalent to a negation, and who cannot understand how a species can have a moral unity and responsibility unless it is derived from one pair, will charge him with denying the federal headship of Adam and the right of the Creator to govern his creatures. Philologists, who cannot see how an inquirer can accept their linguistic discoveries without drawing therefrom all their migratory inferences, will accuse him of ignoring the affinity of the Sanskrit with the German. Let us try to divine how he will maintain himself between two bodies of assailants, who cannot argue against each other without rendering him some assistance.

He will find advantage in the fact that while his position concedes little, it also asserts little. Confessing at the start his inability to prove or disprove that all the dark nations descended from a white man, or that all the white nations descended from a dark one, he will not attempt to convert those learned writers who dispute the physical unity of the human race, nor those other equally learned writers who affirm it. In view of the lack of monuments and documents illustrative of the primal ages, he will commence his first volume at a convenient distance this side of the creation. Remembering that the Adamite peoples were destroyed by the deluge, he will observe that the original seat of modern mankind must not he located in the Garden of Eden, even though that should be positively discovered on the Alpine plateau of Little Bokhara. Having noted that tradition places Mount Ararat in Armenia, five hundred miles north of Shinar, and that, on the other hand, the scripture narrative makes the builders of Babel arrive in Shinar from the east, he will decline to establish a cradle of races on a mountain which is liable at any moment to change its residence. In short, he will prudently leave the startingpoint of humanity in the immense, impenetrable, and sublime obscurity which necessarily covers it. Nor will he strive to show by what routes the pristine tribes quitted an unknown birthplace during an incomputable antiquity.

Copyright, 1878, by H. 0. HOUGHTON & Co.

The first assured step of the modest historian will be to state where those tribes were when they began to leave memorials of their presence and to record their knowledge of each other. His first principle in accepting authorities will be that beyond the information derived from monuments, from places of sepulture, from buried weapons and implements and ornaments, from the remains of languages, and from the inscribed or written accounts of early nations concerning themselves and their neighbor nations, true ancient history cannot go. But before we can admit his premises, before we come to use only such materials as he will use, we must learn to question bravely a formidable array of olden credences and modern hypotheses.

Migrations from the East? A peopling of Europe from Asia? Successive descents of population from the Belurtagh, or the Hindu-Kush,¹ or some other Oriental race cradle? A stream of nations flowing through Scythia, Hellas, Italy, Germany, and Gaul into Spain, Britain, and Scandinavia? All these things are in our days so confidently talked about, and, one may almost say, so minutely and picturesquely described, that the popular mind has learned to look upon them as established facts. Yet the proofs are so slight, and the events themselves are meanwhile so striking to the imagination, that a satirical inquirer is tempted to compare them to the narratives of the conquests of Bacchus and Hercules which were received from the Orientals by the Greeks, or even to the accounts of warring dwarfs and giants which passed current among our mediæval ancestors.

It would he overbold, certainly, to affirm outright that the West was not peopled from the East. But one may surely hold that such peopling could have occurred only at some prodigiously ancient period, and that the evidence of it is so purely composed of conjecture and inference as to be unworthy of the name of history. Just consider the force of the fact that the very oldest chronicles and traditions of Europe fail to speak of westward-flowing migrations. Remark, also, that from all recorded time the Occident has invaded and colonized the Orient far more persistently and successfully than the Orient has colonized the Occident. So much has this been the case that a writer would be pardonable who should set forth the hypothesis that Europe is the true cradle of humanity. He would of course find it impossible to demonstrate his theory; but he would have as much to say as would the advocate of any special conflicting assumption; he would hold his ground triumphantly against Africa and America, and would wage at least an equal battle with Asia.

Let us glance at some of the earliest facts known to us concerning the abiding places and movements of the European peoples. Where were the Pelasgians — the undeveloped ancestors of the Helleno-Italicans — under the light of the first flickering of history? Just where their descendants are now: in Hellas and its northern border of mountains, in the islands of the Grecian sea, in Crete, and Sicily, and Italy. What was passing between them and other men ? It is impossible to say how far we may literally understand the old Aehaian traditions of Egyptian and Punic influences. They may mean conquest; they may mean littoral colonization ; they may mean the civilizing advent of commerce. What we know on the one hand is that the Greeks concede an Egyptian ruler in Argos, an Egyptian or Phœnician ruler in Thebes, and the advent of letters, if not of mining and ship-building, from Egypt or Phœnicia. What we know on the other hand is that Hellas, both insular and continental, soon threw off whatever yoke it may have submitted to, and that its original stock was not displaced nor so much as seriously ingrafted upon by the alien races. It is like some rich gift to the imagination to be permitted to believe that this prosperous sweeping of Hamitic galleys into Pelasgian harbors dates back to the time of the Hyksos kings, who knew Abraham and welcomed Joseph, or at least to that of the great Thothmes dynasty, which succeeded them and poured Egyptian conquest as far as Nineveh.

But only a century or so later than the grand Memphian era, the relations of Mizraim and Hellas had become inverted. In the old age of Rameses II. (the Sesostris of the Greeks), while the Hebrews were building the treasure cities of Pithom and Rameses, and nearly two hundred years before Agamemnon sailed to the shores of Ilium,² Egypt began to be harassed by the fleets of the Pelasgian pirates. Under his son Aleneptha (the Pharaoh of the Exodus) they conquered a large part of the country, took the strong cities of Heliopolis and Memphis, made their name memorable on indestructible monuments for ferocious ravages, and, although at last defeated in a great battle, effected a settlement in the western Delta. Not long afterward, during the period of the Hebrew judges, they landed on the coast of Syria and founded the principalities of the Philistines, the destroyers of Sidon and the subduers of the Israelites. Meanwhile, they were so closely united in adventure with a fair-skinned people in Libya, called by the Egyptians the Mashuash, that we may suspect these last to be of kindred blood, lately arrived from widespread Pelasgia. In short, the first that we know of the movements of the Helleno-Italicans, they were invading Africa and Asia. They were not journeying westward; they were colonizing southward and eastward.

It is difficult to lay too much stress upon the circumstance that these are the earliest facts which we can establish concerning the residence and migrations of the oldest people known to European history. In Egyptian records as ancient as the period of the Exodus there is not the slightest hint that the Pelasgians were looked upon as an Asiatic race, or identified in any manner with the Orient. They are called the men of the north, the men of the mists, the Pelesta of the mid sea, Danaans, and even Achaians. They are depicted with high Caucasian features, often of a beautiful classic type; with light complexions, blue eyes, yellow and even reddish hair. If they had but lately come into Hellas and the isles, it must have been from a land further north, and not, at all events, from the sunburned portions of Asia.

Such is the Egyptian account of the Helleno-Italicans, or Pelasgo-Tyrrhenians, inscribed and colored three thousand five hundred years since; a people as European as any people could be, with no trace of late residence in warmer regions of the earth, and pushing, after the usual manner of Europe, toward the south and east.

Let us now turn to the Hellenes’ own story of their early activities. “The starting-points of the Dorians,” says Curtius, “ were well known to the ancients; they pressed forward out of the Thessalian mountains, forcing a path from district to district.” “ Asiatic Ionia was regarded by common consent as a country composed of Attic colonies, which only gradually became Ionic after the Trojan war.” “ Such was the national pride of the Greeks that they regarded their land as central, — as the starting-point of the most important combinations of peoples.” “The original kinship of the Hellenes and the Phrygians was expressed by representing the Phrygians as emigrants from Europe, and the Armenians, in their turn, as descendants of the Phrygians.”

It is Herodotus who records the tradition of the Macedonians, that from their land, harassed by the savage Thracians, proceeded the Phrygians and Armenians. Other chroniclers, including Xanthus, the historian of Lydia, a writer who preceded the “father of history,” mention a migration of Phrygians out of Thrace. From Herodotus, Theopompus, and Pliny we learn that the mingled Pamphylians were believed to be largely of Greek race, the offspring of heroes who fought under Archilochus and Calchas against Ilium. “ The Lycians,” declares Herodotus, “ are certainly of Cretan origin.” “The Caunians are in my opinion aborigines; nevertheless they assert that they came from Crete.” “ The Carians are a race who migrated • to the main-land [of Asia] from the islands.” He goes on to say that this is the Cretan account, and that the Carians deny the truth of it, calling themselves indigenous. But Strabo follows the Cretan version, both as to the insular origin of this ancient people and as to their expulsion from the archipelago by Dorians and lonians. Thucydides relates that they once held the Cyclades, and that they were driven into Asia by Minos, the suppressor of the pirates. In corroboration of his account he states that when the Athenians purified Delos, during the Peloponnesian war, above one half of the bodies removed from the ancient sepultures proved to be Carians, easily identified by their posture and their armor.

The Mysians, according to Strabo and other writers, were originally Thracians. Philology suggests that they may have descended from the Moesi of the Danube. If any authority or special meaning attaches to the tradition that Car, Mysus, and Lydus were brothers, and if it is conceded that the Carians and Mysians were emigrants from Europe, then the Lydians must be included among European peoples, in spite of Lenormant’s effort to deduce them from the Semites. The Teucrians, the earliest known settlers of the Troad, were believed by the Greeks to have come across the Hellespont. Of Dardanus, who introduced the other element of the Trojan people, we have many traditions, the Italians bringing him from Pelasgic Tyrrhenia or Tuscany, and the Hellenes, with greater probability, making him an adventurer from Crete or, more commonly, from Arcadia. The Bithynians, as Herodotus tells us, called themselves Thracians and emigrants from the banks of the river Strymon, the boundary between Thrace and Macedonia. They added that they were removed from their ancient seats by the Teucrians and Mysians; but this, we must understand, was after those two peoples had become Asiatics and invaders of Europe. Concerning the Thracians there is abundance of Hellenic evidence that they passed both the Hellespont and Bosphorus, and occupied a considerable region along the southern shore of the Black Sea, where they were well known as the Thracians of Asia. Whatever the story of the Argonauts may mean, whether commerce, or freebooting, or colonization, it records a Greek movement eastward. Whatever may be the historical accuracy of the Iliad as to causes and minor incidents, it certainly describes an invasion which poured Argives and Achaians into Asia.

Be it noted that most of the migrations above mentioned are supposed or known to date before the Trojan war. After that event a clearer light opens upon Hellenic history, revealing to us the certitude that it included a widespread colonization eastward and southward, as well as into Sicily, Italy, and Gaul. The old Attic and other Pelasgian communities of Asia Minor, and the still older Carian or Lelegian states of Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna, etc., were rapidly bordered, overlaid, or reinforced by swarms of Athenians, Argives, Thebans, Phocians, Lesbians, Epidamnians, bands of adventurers from every portion of European Greece, the founders or rebuilders of that many-citied Ionia which modern whim has represented as the parent of its own motherland. Spreading broader wings to the gale of prosperity, the Hellenes penetrated the stormy mystery of the Euxine, established towns or trading - posts along its shores as far as the Caucasus, and even mingled with the agricultural Scythians of Southern Russia, producing tribes which spoke a tongue half barbarian. From Thera sailed Lacedaemonians and Minyans, to settle among the nations of Cyrene, — descendants, it may be, of vastly earlier Pelasgo-Tyrrhenian migrations. For a long period after the expedition of Agamemnon the Hellenes were the great colonizing race of the Levant. Meanwhile, the original stock remained in Greece and the isles, unconquered, unmixed, and indestructible.

Now, what is the result of this inquiry into elder and later Pelasgic history? The Hellenes knew of themselves simply as aborigines of Hellas or of the mountainous country immediately north of it. They firmly believed that the greater part of the nations of Asia Minor were colonists from that region, and that the unvarying course of migration in the earliest ages visible to them was from west to east. Of any contrary wayfarings of peoples, of great ethnic journeyings from Asia into Europe, of derivations from Armenia, or Bactria, or India, they had no report and no suspicion. The theory upheld by Curtius and so many other moderns — the theory that the Pelasgic and Thracian settlement of Asia Minor was but a reflux of some mighty anterior tide westward — was totally unknown to Herodotus and to the peoples whose traditions he recorded. From all that we can learn of the Greeks themselves, it would be more rational to bring them from the Alps than from the Belurtagh. If an inquirer will be content with the probable, and will for once throw Oriental tradition to the winds, he will bring them from no further than Thessaly. Will not this be the point where the historian of the future will commence his Grecian history ?

Meanwhile, the historian of the present, clothed in a mixed armor of poetry and philology, bravely combats universal Hellenic tradition. “ The Greeks,” says Curtius, speaking for many others, “ simply inverted their whole connection with the nations of Asia Minor.”

Is not this, when one meditates upon it, a surprising assertion? One of the specially historical races, the very race which invented history, as civilized men understand the word, is accused of systematically and instinctively falsifying its own credences as to its own origin. Is it not, to say the least and the mildest, an improbable hypothesis? But Curtius, you will reply, an eminent thinker and a profound scholar, undoubtedly has reasons for his belief. Yes, he has one: he has the theory of a “ cradle of the Aryan race’’ somewhere in Middle Asia; he has that, and must make all Europe proceed from it, no matter what the ancient Europeans affirm to the contrary. It is a curious fact that, while he repeatedly speaks of the Hellenes as reaching Greece through Asia Minor, he nowhere offers an argument to show that they ever made such a journey. Yet, when he was tossing all Hellenic tradition out of the window, a few proofs that he had a right so to do would surely have been appropriate.

They left kindred peoples behind them in their march westward, he might say; the Afghans, Persians, Armenians, and Phrygians indicate the line of Aryan migration. Why not reverse a pilgrimage which is as easily conceived in one direction as the other? Why not believe the Greeks when they assert that the Phrygians went from Macedonia, and the Armenians from Phrygia? Carry out this tradition sufficiently, and you will account very nicely for the Persians, the Afghans, and the Hindus; for the whole chain of Indo - European races, stretching from the Hellespont to the Ganges. It is as good a hypothesis, in itself considered, as the contrary one. It agrees with the Hindu story of an advent across the Indus quite as well as does the theory of an Aryan race cradle in Turkestan.

By the way, why is it that all these cradles of races and centres of creation must be on Alpine plateaus or amid mountain ranges? It is not usual for Nature to plant and bring forth her choicest germs in such inhospitable regions. Why, then, does the historian of these days conduct his original colonists from Armenian, or Turkoman, or Thibetian altitudes? Is it solely because the story of the ark lingers in his mind? At the centre of his fanciful hypothesis there is a kernel of historic truth. Mountaineers are hardy, needy, heroic, warlike, and aggressive. From mountains descend the subduers of fat plains and wealthy valleys and prosperous seacoasts; from them have marched many nations which have changed the face of history. They are centres of invasion and of conquest. But that is all. As well call an eagle’s nest or a robber baron’s castle a centre of creation.

By the way, also, if the modern historian must always bring forth his races in highland districts, why should he not accept mountainous Hellas as the birthplace of the Greek people? With its delicious climate, its fertile soil, and its seas abounding in fish, it is certainly better adapted to producing men than are the barren steppes of Tartary or the snowy dells of the Belurtagh. It has, moreover, the claim of a central position : the Pelasgic groups were all around it, at the beginning of history; they went forth from it every way, except towards that bitter north which so rarely brooks colonization. Finally, the discoverer of race cradles and creative centres would for once agree with the traditions of the people whose origin he offers to explain.

Of the widely spread Greek settlements under Alexander and his successors, it is not worth while to speak further than to note them as another exhibition of the immemorial tendency of Europe to pour into Asia and Africa.

Let us turn to other Occidental races. We shall still see, so far at least as the light of history extends, that men have gone out from Europe rather than come into it. Who were the Kimmerians? If they were Kymry, as the majority of modern inquirers suppose, then we can understand how so many rivers in Southeastern Europe came by the Keltic prefix of don or dan (river); and we may, moreover, infer that they dwelt during many centuries in that region, for geographical names do not become fixed in a short period. But it does not matter to our present purpose whether the Kimmerians were Kymry or Kimbri, whether they were Gauls or Germans. It suffices to know, as we positively do know, that they were Europeans, and that their first chronicled act was an invasion of Asia. Inhabitants of the country immediately north of the Euxine, pressed upon by the wide, vague, savage power of the Scythians, they left their name to the Krimea and the Kimmerian Bosphorus, burst in successive billows over Asia Minor, and ravaged it as far southward as Cilicia. There were certainly two Kimmerian migrations: one reputed to be seven hundred and eighty-two years before our era, and one some one hundred and twenty years subsequent. Herodotus assumes, from various circumstances, that the invaders followed the eastern shore of the Euxine, along the base of the Caucasus, and so entered Asia Minor by the northeast. Strabo and other authors, speaking probably of the later overflow, describe it as passing the Bosphorus. However and whenever they came, the Kimmerians committed terrible and wide-spread devastations, laying waste Paphlagonia, Bithynia, Ionia, Phrygia, Lydia, and Cilicia, destroying armies, sacking cities, and burning temples. In their second irruption they entered Lydia during the reign of Ardys, and were not expelled until the time of his grandson, Alyattes, the father of the famous Crœsus.

The next great movement of northern peoples was that of the Scythians, the conquerors of the Kimmerians. I say northern, merely, because the term Scythic was applied by the Greeks to both Northeastern Europe and Northwestern Asia, and because it is not certain whether this horde came from the one or the other continent. Herodotus “inclines to believe” that they were Asiatics, and were forced westward by the Massagetæ, a nation undoubtedly Oriental. On the other hand, Aristæus, the epic poet of Proconnesus, a far older writer than Herodotus, who is reputed to have traveled widely in the regions north of the Euxine, states that they were driven upon the Kimmerians by the Issedones, who had been dislodged by the Arimaspians. In other words, they were inhabitants of the region now called Russia, caught in one of those ethnic avalanches from north to south so characteristic of early Europe. Be it noted that if the Kimmerians, in their first movement, really fled through Colchis, the relation of Aristæus seems the most probable. A people dwelling between the Don and the Dnieper could not well retreat directly south, except before invaders who came upon them from the north, or northwest, or west.

Uncertainty concerning the origin of these Scythians still pursues us as we trace out their road into Asia. Losing track of the Kimmerians, as Herodotus surmises, they turned far away toward the Orient, followed the western shore of the Caspian, threaded (probably) the defiles of Kurdistan, and so entered the valley of the Tigris. It must be admitted that this was an immense circuit for a people who had come from at least as far as the banks of the Don. On the other hand, it would have been still more difficult to reach Assyria across Armenia, and perhaps the Kimmerians were not a comfortable race to follow through mountain passes.

However all this may be, the Scythians found Cyaxares, the Mede, attacking Nineveh, defeated him, and became the great Asiatic power of the time. In one of their expeditions they entered Palestine, purposing to conquer Egypt. Psammetiehus, who was then probably engaged in his long siege of Ashdod, “ met them with gifts and prayers, and diverted them from advancing further.” On their return, however, they marched through Ascalon, and a straggling rearguard pillaged the temple of the celestial Venus, “ the most ancient of all the temples dedicated to this goddess. ” For twenty-eight years they were “ the rulers of Asia.” Then Cyaxares rallied strength enough to expel them therefrom, just about the time that Alyattes drove the Kimmerians out of Lydia. Did the Scythians retire altogether from Asia, or did they remain there to give birth to one of the many inexplicable races of that region, such as the Aryan Kurds and the Turanian Parthians? Were the Slavonic hordes then sufficiently developed to send forth such a potent migration, or was this an offshoot of that Finnish or Ugrian population which in the traditionary ages waged battle with the Slaves for the empire of Scythia? I will merely say that I incline to believe Aristæus when he tells us that the pursuers of the Kimmerians came from Europe.

Let us now consider the Kelts. The prevalent theory is that they arrived in their present dwelling-places from the Orient, and philologists trace their march westward by the Gallic names of rivers and regions, such as the Don, the Dnieper, the Danube, Bohemia, and Bavaria. But these fossilized Keltic words disappear the moment that you enter the proper East. Except, perhaps, in ancient Galatia, there is not a sign throughout all Asia that Gaelic or Kymric tribes ever dwelt there. Furthermore, what were these tribes doing when they first became known to the historywriting peoples? Migrating, after the immemorial fashion of olden Europeans, toward the rising or the midday sun. We have already glanced at the expeditions of the possibly Keltic Kimmerians. The same tendency southward or eastward is discoverable in the earliest chronicled movements of the clans of ancient Gallia. In the time of Tarquinius Priscus, if Livy is correctly informed, this mother of warriors sent forth two gigantic migrations: one, mainly composed of Boians, crossed the Rhine, occupied Bavaria, and eventually seized Bohemia, giving their name to both regions; the other, drawn from the superfluous youth of half a dozen nations, pushed southward, ’ overwhelmed the Ligurian Salyans near Marseilles, traversed the Alps, defeated the Etruscans on the Ticinus, settled in Western Lombardy. and built Mediolanum, now Milan. From the fact that they found the country already known as lnsubria, it appears probable that they were preceded by other Gauls, of whose history we have no record but this single word.

Following on this migration came successively the Cenomanians, the Salluvians, the Boians, and Lingonians, dispossessing Ligurians, Etruscans, Umbrians, and filling all Northern Italy. Three hundred and ninety years before our era arrived the Senonians, famous for the victory of the Allia and the sack of Rome. A hundred years later the Tectosages and other tribes marched through Germany, devastated Macedonia and Thessaly, penetrated Greece as far as Delphi, traversed a large part of Asia Minor, and founded Galatia. About 100 B. C., the Helvetians and Tigurini took part in the Kimbrian movement: the former invading Italy and returning safely to their mountains, laden with plunder; the latter defeating and killing the consul, L. Cassius Longinus, near Lake Leman. As the result of these great outpourings there were Gallic, colonies throughout all Middle Europe. Northern Italy, Switzerland, Swabia, the Tyrol, Bavaria, Bohemia, a large part of Germanic Austria, scattered tracts far down the course of the Danube, and even, for a time, districts in Macedonia and Thrace, were held by the victorious hordes.

We have, be it observed, a series of movements toward the east, and none toward the west. The Kelts, so far as we can learn anything of them from history, had nothing to do with Asia, except as invaders and colonizers. Is it not fair to suppose that the Kimmerians, or whatever tribes named the Don, the Dnieper, the Dniester, and the Danube, may have come from ancient Gallia, as well as the Boians of Bohemia, the Senonians of Umbria, and the Tectosages of Galatia? Why imagine an immensely ancient movement from the Orient to account for geographical nomenclatures which are sufficiently accounted for by a well-known movement toward the Orient ? The historian should always accept the simple and the obvious when they will explain his facts as well as the complex and the obscure.

Nor do we find in Spain that the Kelts, when first discovered, or for long previous, were journeying toward the Atlantic. They held the barren mountains like a nation which is defending itself with difficulty; while the darkskinned Iberians held the rich plains and valleys, like a victorious people. It is clear that the tide of conquest was rolling northward, gradually submerging the Gauls, driving them into fastnesses, or perhaps forcing them from the peninsula. We may fairly conclude that the Basque population in Aquitaine was not the débris of a settlement which had been left undisturbed by westwardinarching Gauls, but the result of an Iberian overflow of the Pyrenees. Supposing this to be the ease, we can perfectly understand the great Boian, Avernian, Senonian, and Galatian wayfarings. The Gauls had a potent and harassing foe behind them; the general set of Western Europe was then eastward.

But whence came the Iberians ? Scholars have sought for their root-words in the Finnish and other Turanian languages. In view of the fact that when first discovered they were pushing northward, would it not be well to direct this inquiry toward the tongues of Barbary? Within the cognizance of history Spain has been twice conquered from Africa. It would be no very violent conceit to imagine that Hamilcar’s Libyan spearmen or Numidian troopers may have found a kindred race in the Iberic peninsula.

Let us turn to the Germans. During the great period of Gallic activity and migration, — a cycle of conquests which perhaps extends from the advent of the Kimmerians to the settlement of Galatia, — during these five centuries and all the centuries which preceded them, and for nearly two centuries after them, the Germans remained unknown to the history-writing nations. It is not unusual to account for this obscurity of a people subsequently so famous by suggesting that they were in the mysterious deserts of Tartary or Siberia, making their way toward Europe from the Aryan race cradle in Central Asia. The supposition is utterly unsupported by facts; and is it not also unnecessary? We may fairly believe that the Teutonic tribes were in the earlier ages much less numerous, less civilized, and worse armed than when they appeared, strangely mingled with Gallic hordes, before the Rome of Marins. Their rude dwellings may as well be imagined in Scandinavia, around the Southern Baltic, in Prussia, and in Hanover, as in Baetria or Scythia. There was plenty of room for them amid that chilly and boggy northern wilderness where the mightier Kelts, intent upon reaching the lands of the vine and the palm, did not care to wander.

The very earliest fact which we know of concerning the Germans is furnished by Julius Cæsar. When he speaks of an ancient time, during which the Gauls frequently invaded and colonized their eastern neighbors, he couples it with an allusion to the trans-Rhenan conquests of the Volcæ and Tectosages, the spoilers of Asia. It follows that the Germans were in Middle Germany three hundred years before our era. Nor is there any fact or inference to show that they had not been there for many centuries previous. And when the Keltic line of tribes from the Rhine to Thrace was at length broken, the assault was undoubtedly delivered by the Teutonic foresters lying to the north of it. The Hermunduri, as we know, recovered Swabia, and the Marcomanni Bohemia. The great Helvetian movement, which included Boians and Rauraci, was a flight of Kelts from Germany, seeking safety in the populousness of ancient Gallia.

Thus there is no cause for inventing a warlike migration out of Asia to account for the disappearance of Gauls and the subsequent presence of Teutons in Austria, Bohemia, aud Bavaria. Both the need and the proof of an ethnic pilgrimage from the Belurtagh, or some other Oriental race cradle, vanish into air. In short, history finds the Germans already in Germany; and there the coming historian of them will begin his judicious narrative. At that point, and no earlier, opens the wondrous tale of Teutonic migration: Kimbrians, Teutones, Suevians, Goths, Franks, Burgundians, Lombards, Saxons, following each other in stormy succession; in more modern times, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Frederic Barbarossa, Charles the Fifth, and the English invading Asia, Africa, and America; Germans forever bursting out of their native abode to colonize the four quarters of the globe. No race has done more to show that the mission of Europe has been to send forth rather than to receive populations.

Of the Slavonians, before the Greeks began to write of them, we know just this: that we do not know of their coming from the Orient. According to Herodotus, all the country which we now call Russia — all the country between the Don and the Dniester and far to the northward — was anciently filled with a multitude of nations, whom he styles Scythians, Sarmatians, Issedones, Arimaspians, etc. From the frozen sea to the Danube, these wild hordes were crowding upon each other, forever pushing southward, driving before them Kimmerians and Thracians, aud perhaps flowing after them into Asia. The Sarmatians aud Scythians spoke cognate languages, and we may infer that they were both of Slavonic race. There is no good reason why we should not hold that all these peoples were Slaves and Ugrians, the ancestors of Croat, Pole, Bohemian, Russian, Finn, and Lapp. There is solid reason to believe that the Finns anciently dwelt much farther south than at present, and that a considerable proportion of the present inhabitants of Middle Russia are of Finnish stock, their nationality and language having disappeared under Slavic conquest.

The Slaves have been slow to mature in civilization and slow to exceed their early boundaries. Not until migration had left Germany half deserted did they begin to drift westward. Not until the Byzantine empire was in its decadence did they, to our certain knowledge, cross the Danube. One tribe alone exhibited, during the dark ages, an enterprise equal to that of the Teutonic nations of conquerors. The Vandals, or Wends, marched through Germany, Gaul, and Spain, to found a power in Africa, and even renewed the naval grandeurs of Carthage by sailing to the shores of Italy and plundering Rome. But the African Wends were destroyed by Belisarius; the Wends of Prussia were crushed by Henry the Fowler and by the Teutonic Ritters; the Bulgarians and Russians were foiled in their assaults on Constantinople by Basil II. and by John Zimisces. The Scythia of Herodotus has waited twenty-three centuries to see a Scythian empire take potent shape and resume the everlasting European task of overrunning Asia.

The Hungarians, or Magyars, were for long supposed to be an Oriental people. But we now know that their language is closely related to the Finnish, and that there is no historical reason for assuming them to be emigrants from the East. When first discovered they were just north of the Caucasus; then between the Don and the Dniester; then in Hungary. It seems reasonable to believe that they left an abode in Northeastern Europe, drifted southward along the western base of the Ural chain, and thence followed the Volga to their Caucasian seat. No honest historian will insist on bringing them out of Bactria any more than on deriving them from the Huns, or from Gog and Magog. It is true that, there are Finnish or Ugrian peoples to the east of the Urals and the Volga. But which is the parent group, the Asiatic or the European ? We cannot certainly decide; the one as likely, perhaps, as the other.

Neither the Roman conquests and settlements nor the gigantic deluges of the crusades produced any permanent impression upon the races of Asia. It is merely worth while to note them as additional proofs that, in the struggle between the two continents, it is the western one which generally plays the part of invader and colonizer.

Let us now consider the known migrations of the Orient into the Occident. In the elder times, as we have already seen, there was a constant advance and retreat of armed hordes across the Hellespont and Bosphorus. Kimmerians and Thracians passed over into Asia; Mysians and Teucrians (after they became Asiatic) into Europe. But the majority of these inroads, especially those which established peoples, came from the northern shore. Indeed, it does not appear from Herodotus that a single tribe of Asia Minor founded a lasting colony in Thrace or Macedonia.

The mighty invasions of the Persians, whether directed against Greeks or Scythians, ended in disaster and withdrawal. For eight hundred and fifty years after the repulse of Xerxes not a single Oriental people, so far as record or tradition or monuments can inform us, penetrated the western continent. In 375 A. D. the Huns appeared in Sarmatia, rapidly built up an empire which extended from the Rhine to China, gathered half of barbaric Europe under their banners, recoiled at Chalons before Ætius and Theodoric, buried their great king Attila in 453, fell to pieces almost immediately, and vanished utterly. It was a conquest of some eighty years in duration; not a single Hunnic settlement remained as a consequence of it; no new element was added to the population of the West.

Of the Alani, who aided the Vandals to overrun Gaul in 406 A. D., I will merely remark that their origin is unknown, and that they are as likely to have been Slavic or Finnic as Asiatic. The Mongolian Avars entered Dacia in 555 A. D. ; conquered Pannonia some thirteen years afterward; oppressed the Slaves, pillaged Germany and Italy, and founded settlements in Greece; were nearly exterminated by Charlemagne; and shortly disappeared as a people. If any remnants of them exist, they are mingled with the Bulgarians, their language long since extinct.

Eight centuries or more after the Huns, the Mongols played a similar part in European history. Advancing under Genghis Khan and his sons from the borders of China, they completed the conquest of Russia by the middle of the thirteenth century, and lost it by the middle of the fifteenth. We find, as results of their inroad, no Mongols this side of the Volga and the Urals. A population of Tartars, the subjects and soldiers of Genghis, still clings about Kazan and in the Krimea and along the northern shore of the Black Sea. But it is a slender and impotent vein, more likely to vanish than to increase.

Of the intrusion of the Moors into Spain I need say little. They came, and they are gone. It is worth adding, perhaps, that this was mainly an African migration. The number of Saracens and other Asiatics who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar was insignificant as compared with the multitudes of Moors who accompanied and followed them.

The Turks. At last we find, west of the Euxine, a people whose origin appears to be. Asiatic, although we have a right to note that their language is allied to the Magyar and Finnish, and that this fact justifies a suspicion — a mere suspicion — of ultimate Uralian descent. But no matter whether the three millions of European Ottomans are the offspring of a primal Oriental tribe or of an Occidental tribe temporarily lost in the Orient. An easier question, and one quite as germane to our general purpose, is, How long can they remain where they are? We seem already to discover signs that they will soon fall into subjection, and presently thereafter vanish, as a people, from their seat of conquest. Then, once more, Europe will be free of Asiatic colonists.

Well, we have gone over the whole recorded battle of races between the two continents. The result is that, so far as history can throw any light on the subject, no Oriental stock appears to have made any large or permanent impression on the population of the Occident. What, then, of the times of unchronicled antiquity? Is it not fair to suppose that, in the main, they were like in this matter to the times which we know ? The men of cold regions are usually hardier, more warlike, and more difficult to subdue than the men of warm ones. If civilized Europe has repelled civilized Asia, it is probable that barbaric Europe repelled barbaric Asia.

“ But the old Turanians! ’’ answers one of the wilder devotees of the Oriental centre of creation. “ In the stone age there were Turanians all over Europe; the Basques and Finns are probably remnants of them, and of course all Turanians are by origin Asiatic.”

Ah, my enthusiastic friend, you have not yet proved your old Turanians. You do not in the least know to what race belonged the lake dwellers of Switzerland and the cave dwellers of France. You do not yet feel sure that the Basque is related to the Finnish, nor have you auy certainty that the Turanians did not primally proceed from Europe. At all events, let us stop talking confidently of the origin of these extinct troglodytes and lacustrians. It may even be that they were not very ancient. The stone age of Switzerland was coeval, perhaps, with the bronze age of Italy, the iron age of Greece, the splendor of Babylon, and the decrepitude of Egypt. The prehistoric Swiss are more likely to have been the ancestors of the Gauls who succeeded them than to have been the relatives of peoples whom history has never known in the neighborhood of their curious dwellings. A derivation near at hand has a stronger claim to belief than one brought from the antipodes.

“ But the immensely ancient past? ” queries the Belurtagh theorist. “ The time when from the Tagus to the Urals there were not even any lake dwellers? The time when there was no one? A period must have been during which Europe was an uninhabited wilderness. How was it peopled ? ”

Well, I do not know, and neither does any one. That is the plain, gigantic, widely visible, and, I fear, indestructible fact of the case. It covers and dominates all history and all tradition and all hypothesis. The very humbling and yet really valuable result of our inquiry is that we are brought to admit our complete ignorance.

Nevertheless, in reviewing the subject, certain inferences may seem permissible; and I shall venture, with many doubts of their correctness, to state them as follows: —

First, There is no proof, whether historical, or traditionary, or archæological, that the great races of Europe arrived thither from Asia. Within the historic era colonization has been mainly the other way, flowing oftenest and most potently from west to east, though without permanent result in changing populations. Of ethnic movements during the prehistoric era we know nothing whatever, — neither as to the direction in which they tended, nor even as to whether there were any. In short, there is no solid basis for the popular theory that the European races came from Bactria, or Thibet, or the Hindoo-Kush, or some other Asiatic centre of creation.

Second, There is some historical or at least traditionary reason for believing that the so-called Aryan peoples of Asia proceeded from Europe. On the other hand, neither victorious invaders nor wayfarers who could choose their abodes at will in an uninhabited region would be likely to occupy the barren mountains where history discovers the Armenians, Persians, Kurds, and Afghans, Did the unremembered forefathers of these nations dispossess some Central Asiatic race, long since extinct and gone to forgetfulness? Were they themselves then encroached upon by the Semites, and driven out of the rich valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates into the rugged uplands where our earliest records place them? Or is this chain of Indo-European mountaineers, stretching of old from the Hellespont to the Indus, a proof that the Indo-European stock is aboriginal to the Orient? We have a certain measure of geographic probability pitted against other probabilities supported by Hellenic tradition. Shall we decide in favor of Mount Hæmus or of the Belurtagh? My belief is that the historian of the future will make no decision whatever, and will commence his history of the Armenians, for instance, by saying that they were first found in Armenia.

Third, So far as our knowledge extends, the great European races have never materially changed their habitats, not even in Europe. The ancient stock of the Goths has not disappeared from Scandinavia. The Teutons still hold as much of Germany as they held when Cæsar revealed them to us. The “ drums and tramplings of many conquests ” have not driven the races of the Helleno-Italicans from their ancient seats. In spite of giant colonizations into America and Australia, there are more Anglo-Saxons in Great Britain, more Iberians and Keltiberians in Spain and Portugal, than when those movements commenced. It may be objected that the Kelts have lost both territory and power; that Saxons, Franks, and Burgundians have driven them from much of England and France; that their Brenns no longer lead them victorious from the Atlantic to the Bosphorus; that they are not found in Bavaria and Bohemia and along the Danube; and that even their languages have nearly fallen dumb. But the destruction caused by the Germanic incursions is popularly exaggerated; the northern French and the western British are still in the main either Gaelic or Kymric; the old blood beats, although the old tongue is silent. In the matter of diffusion, also, we must not forget the days of Napoleon. Under him Gallic warriors once more trampled half Europe and part of the Orient; under him the range of the old heroic race was even wider than when it strove against phalanx and maniple. We must not eonfound the temporary empire of a people with its permanent abode. The former expands and contracts; the latter seems unchangeable. Notwithstanding the narrowing of Keltic conquests, the race itself is more numerous than ever, and still holds, in the main, its primal lands.

Fourth, No migration which forces its way into a denser population of a vigorous race can long keep its own char-, acteristics or maintain a separate existence. Look at the disappearance of the Saracens from Spain; of the Huns and Mongols and Alani from Middle Europe; of the Roman swarms which settled in Africa and the Levant and Germany ; of the Greek communities which once flourished in Scythia, Asia Minor, arid Bactria. A million crusaders took no root in Syria. The Vandals perished from Tunis, and the Visigoths from Aragon. The Franks and the Lombards ceased long since to be distinguishable from the peoples whom they conquered. The Normans rapidly became French in France, Italians in Naples, and English in England. The descendants of the Danes who triumphed under Guthrum do not know themselves from the descendants of the Saxons who regained their sovereignty under Alfred. The German immigrants to the United States are surely assimilating, in appearance and language, to the Americans of English race. History is full of similar instances of the absorption of transplanted stocks of humanity. It seems to be certain that colonization is a difficult venture, prosperous only under very favorable conditions. To thrive easily, abundantly, and permanently, it needs fertile soil, a hospitable climate, and uninhabited or thinly peopled territories, such as were offered by the America of Columbus. A dense population can colonize successfully into a sparse one; but a sparse population cannot hold its ground amid a dense one. As a result of this rule the world will some day see the downfall of the British empire in India, and perhaps of the Russian empire in Northern Asia.

Fifth, No migration which quits its native latitude or climate can permanently flourish. There is reason to believe that, without the favoring of artificial and incessant culture, this law holds good of shells, of plants, and of the lower animals. Its application to humanity, at least, is proved by all history. In Tunis, Cyrene, Egypt, and Mesopotamia there are no communities which we can even suspect of being descended from the Greek and Roman colonies planted there from the time of Meneptha to the time of the Cæsars. All the southward Germanic migrations have vanished from sight, like rivers lost in meridional deserts. The Mongols have disappeared out of Hindostan, and the Turks fail to perpetuate their race beside the Nile. Meantime, Teutons, Kelts, and Iberians colonize successfully their own latitudes in America and Southern Africa and Australia.

It would seem, at first sight, that there is an exception to this rule in the chain of Aryan peoples stretching diagonally across Asia from Smyrna to Calcutta. But it should be observed that most of these nations are mountaineers, and so possess a climate similar to that of their supposed original seat, whether this be Europe or on the table-land of Bokhara. It should also he admitted that their geographical position and continuing existence constitute one of the notable puzzles of history.

Well, here we are, at the end of our little line of knowledge, pieced out though it be with tradition and inference. What is the result? There is an infinite past, or what seems to our short-sighted view an infinite past, in the great adventure of humanity. We see the harbors at which it has arrived, but not the routes by which it voyaged, nor the points from which it started. We behold, perhaps, but the survivors of the mighty armada. There is a solemn possibility that many races of pristine men have gone all to wreck, their languages unrecorded like those of the extinct tribes of Hispaniola, or surviving only as enigmas like the Etruscan. Amid the chances and changes and obscure tragedies of the unchronicled past, how ridiculous for the searcher into origins to pretend that he treads securely! He cannot so tread; he does not know the itineraries of the primeval nations; he has not discovered their prehistoric seats, and much less their centres of creation. Of Europe, for instance, he is sure only that there came a period when it was found to be inhabited by races which yet abide there, and which in the main have kept their possession good against intruders from other continents. There, as I venture to predict, the historian of thirty years hence will begin European history.