to the effect, that 'to deduce the Indo-Europeans of Europe from the Indo-Europeans of Asia, in ethnology, is like deriving the reptiles of Great Britain from those of Ireland in erpetology.'[1]
Thus the voice of recent research[2] is raised very decidedly in favour of Europe, though there is no complete unanimity as to the exact portion of Europe to regard as the early home of the Aryans; but the competition tends to lie between North Germany and Scandinavia, especially the south of Sweden. This last would probably do well enough as the country in which the Aryans may have consolidated and organized themselves before beginning to send forth their excess of population to conquer the other lands now possessed by nations speaking Aryan languages. Nor can one forget that all the great states of modern Europe, except that of the Sick Man, trace their history back to the conquests of the Norsemen who set out from the Scandinavian land which Jordanis[3] proudly calls officina gentium and vagina nationum. But I doubt whether the teachings of evolution may not force us to trace them still further towards the north: in any case, the mythological indications to which your attention has been called, point, if I am not mistaken, to some spot within the Arctic Circle, such, for example, as the region where Norse legend placed the Land of Immortality, somewhere in the north of Finland and the neighbourhood of
- ↑ Latham's Germania of Tacitus, Epilegomena, p. cxlij.
- ↑ See more especially Penka's Origines Ariacæ, Vienna, 1883; Schrader's Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte, Jena, 1885; Wilser's Herkunft der Deutschen, Carlsruhe, 1885; and Penka's Herkunft der Arier, Vienna, 1886.
- ↑ De Origine Actibusque Getarum, ed. Holder, cap. 4 (p. 6).
