of northern and central Asia. But before we have gathered in all the members of the great family we are seeking to establish, we must cross the border of Europe, and enter southern Asia.
Asia Minor is chiefly in the hands of Turkish tribes, who have crowded themselves in there in comparatively modern times, driving out, or subjecting and assimilating, the previous occupants. The same races stretch eastward, across the southern extremity of the Caspian sea, intervening between Europe and the countries whose speech shows affinity with that of Europe. But within, in the hilly provinces of Media and Persia, and on the great Iranian table-land, which stretches thence to the Indus, we find again abundant traces of a linguistic tradition coinciding ultimately with our own. The Persian, with all its dialects, ancient and modern, and with its outliers on the north-west and on the east—as the Armenian, the Kurdish, the Ossetic, and the Afghan—constitutes a branch of our family, the Persian or Iranian branch. And yet one step farther we are able to pursue the same tie of connection. The Iranian languages conduct us to the very borders of India: beyond those borders, in Hindustan, between the bounding walls of the Himalayas and Vindhyas, and eastward to the mouths of the Ganges, lies the easternmost branch of that grand division of human speech to which our own belongs, the Indian branch, comprising the ancient Sanskrit, with its derived and kindred languages.
The seven groups of languages at which we have thus glanced—namely, the Indian, the Persian, the Greek, the Latin, the Slavonic (including the Lithuanic), the Germanic, and the Celtic—each made up of numerous dialects and sub-dialects, are the members composing one vast and highly-important family of human speech, to which, from the names of its two extreme members, we give the title of "Indo-European." It is known also by various other designations: some style it "Japhetic," as if it appertained to the descendants of the patriarch Japhet, as the so-called "Semitic" tongues to the descendants of Shem; "Aryan" is a yet more popular and customary name for it, but is liable to objection, as being more especially appropriate to the joint Indo-Persian branch of
