Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: between Greek and Slavonic, or between Indo-Iranian and either Latin or Teutonic. Hence the European Aryans form a closely-united circular chain of six links; but there is one vacant placeone link is missing from the chain. This missing link is discovered far away in Asia, where we find the Indo-Iranians, who are very closely united with each other, but whose affinities with the European Aryans are chiefly with the Slaves on the one hand, and with the Greeks on the other. They clearly constitute the missing link in the chain, which would be complete in its continuity if they had at some former period occupied the vacant post. Only two hypotheses are possible. The Aryan nguages must either have all originated in Europearound the spot marked E; one member, the Indo- Iranian, separating from the rest, and migrating to its present position, or they must all have originated in Asia, and have been grouped originally round the spot marked A, and then have migrated severally to E, preserving in their new homes the precise relative positions which their mutual connections prove must have originally existed. Which is the more probable hypothesisthat of a single migration, the migration of a people whom we know to have been nomads at no very distant time, or six distinct migrations of six separate peoples, as to which there is no evidence whatever that they ever migrated at all, and whose traditions assert that they were autochthons ? Latham's argument was more conclusive than any that had been advanced on the other side; but it was unheeded. The assumption as to the Asiatic origin of the European peoples was so firmly rooted, and, more than all, was upheld by the authority of such great names, that no one thought it worth while to take the trouble even to reply. His voice was ...