OLD AND NEW ASPECTS OF THE ARYAN QUESTION.'
This book is a monograph oi Homo Europcstis ; that is, of that variety of man which has been designated by writers in different fields by the various names of the dolichocephalic-blond, the Kymric, the Galatic, the Germanic, and the Aryan race. I prefer to designate the race ordinarily by the scientific name given to it by Linnaeus. In a work devoted to the scientific study of a form of Homo it is desirable to use a zoological termi- nology such as is employed in describing Felis, Corvus, or Atnmo- nites. Such a terminology is a means of impressing upon the reader that man is biologically akin to the animals and subject to the same biological laws. Too often man is regarded, even in serious works, as an exceptional being apart from, or even superior to, law. This is an error which must be rigidly avoided. The arbitrary in human affairs exists only in the imagination of mystics. Anthropo-sociology, and in general political science as based on the doctrine of evolution, is bound to substitute a concrete knowledge of the laws of human life in place of the metaphysical and mystic conceptions of the sociology of the philosophers.
If I employ also the term Aryan, I do so partly to avoid constant repetition of the longer designation, and partly as a con- cession to the reading public whose education is usually literary rather than scientific. Ammon, Wilser, Muffang, Fouillee, Clos- son, Ujfalvy, Ripley, and others have, indeed, employed in pub- lications of a more or less popular character the terminology that I adopted from Linnzeus, but it still needs to be explained by the terminology in more general use. I have had, then, to choose between the words : Kymric, Germanic, and Aryan. The first of these, which means literally compatriots, dates only from the Middle Ages, and has been used only in reference to some Gallic tribes. The second has never been generally accepted as
' Translated by Carlos C. Closson.
These pages are from the introductory chapter of the forthcoming work of de Lapouge, L'Aryen.
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