Historic Periods, etc.
have awakened modern sympathies for prehistoric and primitive experiences; and they have demonstrated to us that, however far we may have advanced along material and mechanical lines, in art and science, our spiritual character and psychological processes have not changed through tens of thousands of years.
Long after the Persian and the Indian ancestral tribes had migrated eastward, those of our European groups were making their way slowly “from treeless steppes and pasturelands into a country of forests.” During “this West-Aryan or European period, when the ancestors of the Greeks, the Romans, the Celts and Teutons were still closely connected, a number of words for trees and birds make their first appearance.”[1] To this period have been traced the words, beech, elm, hazel, swallow, throstle, finch, starling, corn, furrow, meal, bean, ear (of corn), to ear (to plow). This would seem to indicate a change of environ-
- ↑ The English Language. (Smith.)
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