era, and the tenth century of the
Western chronology.

Having to dispose of an "historical difficulty" of such a serious
character, the defendants charged with it can but repeat what they have
already stated; all depends upon the past history and antiquity allowed
to the Indo-Aryan nation. The first step to take is to ascertain how
much History herself knows of that almost prehistoric period when the
soil of Europe had not been trodden yet by the primitive Aryan tribes.
From the latest Encyclopedia down to Professor Max Muller and other
Orientalists, we gather what follows; they acknowledge that at some
immensely remote period, before the Aryan nations got divided from the
parent stock (with the germs of Indo-Germanic languages in them); and
before they rushed asunder to scatter over Europe and Asia in search of
new homes, there stood a "single barbaric (?) people as physical and
political representative of the nascent Aryan race." This people spoke
"a now extinct Aryan language," from which by a series of modifications
(surely requiring more thousands of years than our difficulty-makers are
willing to concede) there arose gradually all the subsequent languages
now spoken by the Caucasian races.

That is about all Western history knows of its genesis. Like Ravana's
brother, Kumbhakarna,--the Hindu Rip van Winkle--it slept for a long
series of ages a dreamless, heavy sleep. And when at last it awoke to
consciousness, it was but to find the "nascent Aryan race" grown into
scores of nations, peoples and races, most of them effete and crippled
with age, many irretrievably extinct, while the true origin of the
younger ones it was utterly unable to account for. So much for the
"youngest brother." As for "the eldest brother, the Hindu," who,
Professor Max Muller tells us, "was the last to leave the central home
of the Aryan family," and whose history this eminent philologist has now
kindly undertaken to impart to him,--he, the Hindu, claims that while
his Indo-European relative was soundly sleeping under the protecting
shadow of Noah's ark, he kept watch and did not miss seeing one event
from his high Himalayan fastnesses; and that he has recorded the
history thereof, in a language which, though as incomprehensible as the
Iapygian inscriptions to the Indo-European immigrant, is quite clear to
the writers. For this crime he now stands condemned as a falsifier of
the records of his forefathers. A place has been hither