shall use without scruple the words Aryans, Aryan languages and nations.

I must meet in advance a possible reproach: for Bossuet's Semitic history you would substitute an Aryan history. You only dethrone the chosen people in order to put forward another privileged, predestined group. Yes and no. I suppress no fact of history. I attribute nothing more to the Aryans than the science of language allows them; they began, like all others, in savagery; but since they came late in time, and with an already developed language and intelligence, they rapidly reaped the benefit of the inventions of their predecessors. The Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Semites in Western Asia, the Chinese in the extreme East had reached a level which the Aryans have since passed in their institutions, in the arts, and in the expression of thought. For two or three thousand years the direction of the world has fallen to the Aryans, and, in spite of momentary failures, of Arabic, Mongolian, or Turkish incursions, they have kept the torch, they have carried it into America, into Australia, and returning to their cradle by sea and by land, they bear the light even into the heart of Africa, even into the dim twilight of the East.

Compare the false and incoherent history to which Bossuet lent the support of his eloquence-history modified to suit the Jewish Bible as it was revised in the fifth century, and the prophecies after the event of Daniel and of John; compare it with the realities unveiled by the discovery of the Indo-European group. Note how the movements of the peoples are ordered and illuminated by it. While from the eastern slope of the great Asiatic plateaus the ancestors of the Chinese descended their rivers, the Blue and the Yellow,

and multiplied in their immense empire, isolated, useless, and unknown, two centres of civilisation arose, on the banks of the Nile and at the mouth of the Euphrates. Separated from these Egypto-Semites by the Himalaya and the desert, slowly increasing tribes of white men, part shepherds and part agriculturists, monogamous, worshippers of the heavenly bodies, gradually, under the pressure of the Mongols, leave their common country, forgetting each other as they travel, but retaining their idioms and their acquired culture exactly in the proportion of their increasing distance. The Celts are driven westward by the Gauls, the Gauls by the Germans, these by the Slavs and Lithuanians, themselves urged forward and finally overrun by the Mongols and the incursion of the Huns. The future Hindus are already making their way among the affluents of the Indus. Lastly, the Greeks and Latins, passing south of the Celts, Germans, and Slavs, and north of the Semitic world, follow the right bank of the Danube, and one stream of them flows towards Thrace and Thessaly, the other towards the Tiber. The Iranians alone remain, harassed by the continual attacks of the Turks; they reach Media, Persia, conquer and take the place of the old Semitic empires, and come into collision in Ionia and at Marathon with their old neighbours, now forgotten, with the Hellenes, already masters of the Mediterranean basin.

This large and simple view gives the true meaning of history. It explains the successive effacements of the ancient civilisations, the encounters and the strifes of the Gauls and the Italiots, of the Hellenes and the Persians, of the Germans and the Græco-Roman world, the Mongolian incursions into the field left clear by the Aryan migrations, and the equilibrium slowly

established by the mutual resistance of the various races, occasionally disturbed by these passing irruptions. It explains also the movements of the Germans, checked by the Celtic block, and returning against the Slavs, who, long the victims of shock and countershock, fluctuated, without a fixed frontier, between Germany and the Tartar chaos. The various German invasions declare themselves as the consequences of the primeval impulse. Even the conquest of the Americas and of Oceania may be said to proceed from the impulse communicated by the pressure of the Mongols, four thousand years ago, to the tribes who dwelt between Turkhestan and the Oxus.

Such is the new conception of history, which rejects as a chimera the divine plan and the biblical genealogies; it is the creation of philology.

PART III.

THE INDO-EUROPEAN ORGANISM.

CHAPTER I.

INDO-EUROPEAN ROOTS.

Inflexion a higher degree of agglutination - The Indo-European material consists of full roots and empty roots, demonstrative or pronominal, and attributive or verbal-Pronominal roots: pronouns and suffixes-Attributive roots, primary, secondary, and tertiary— Reduction of the variants to a small number of ancestral forms -Roots expressing an action of the mind: the ma family-The naked root, the theme or radical, often preserved by the composition of words.

THE kinship of the Indo-European languages is a phenomenon of the same order as the close affinity of the Bantu, Berber, Turkish, or Semitic dialects. Their area is not more extensive than that of the Malay idioms. The ethnic differences between the nations which have acquired them are not greater than between the various Malayo-Polynesian groups. The pre-existence of a common speech and of a human aggregate where this mother-tongue was formed, is not less evident and less necessary here than in the case of the other independent families. All the earlier types have perished, because writing was unknown; but they may yet be traced in the idioms derived from them. Indeed, it is not only what may be called the first types that have disappeared;

even secondary forms have often passed away without leaving any monument of their existence; nothing is left of the Teutonic, Slav, and Italic stems, which have produced so many different branches. Fortunately we possess in their earliest as well as in their latest forms Sanscrit, Iranian, Greek, and Latin; and it is enough to compare with these the Hindu, Persian, Romaic, and Romance groups, which have issued from them, to understand the formation of the eight IndoEuropean branches, and to determine that they are all issued from a common trunk.

Hence there is no mystery about the origin of these languages, save that obscurity which belongs to vast distances in time. The peoples which have carried along with them, or received in the course of their wanderings, the elements of the same intellectual cultivation, have, more or less rapidly, risen above the level of other races and nations. This fact is historical and patent; it need not surprise us, since we find everywhere these inequalities in aptitude and destiny. Is not the Malay superior to the Papuan, the Moor to the Negro, the Aztec to the Abipone, the Semite to the Berber, the Chinese to the Mongol? Latest in time, the Aryan is heir to the conquests of his predecessors, and their apogee was his point of departure. Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria had given their measure and spent their force; with livelier energy, with greater breadth and subtlety of mind, he took in hand the abandoned task; and this intellectual and æsthetic superiority is manifest to us in his speech.

But his language is not separated from others by any gulf; it only differs from them by a more intimate combination of the same original elements; it has outstripped them, but on the same road. It is