istorical Europe. He traces out how
each branch starts with its own share of the common stock--how the
language, the creed, the institutions, once common to all, grow up into
different, yet kindred, shapes, among the many parted branches which
grew up, each with an independent life and strength of its own. This
is what our instructors set before us as the true origin of nations and
their languages. And, in drawing out the picture, we cannot avoid, our
teachers themselves do not avoid, the use of words which imply that the
strictly family relation, the relation of community of blood, is at the
root of the whole matter. We cannot help talking about the family and
its branches, about parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins. The
nomenclature of natural kindred exactly fits the case; it fits it so
exactly that no other nomenclature could enable us to set forth the
case with any clearness. Yet we cannot be absolutely certain that
there was any real community of blood in the whole story. We really
know nothing of the origin of language or the origin of society. We
may make a thousand ingenious guesses; but we cannot prove any of them.
It may be that the group which came together, and which formed the
primeval society which spoke the primeval Aryan tongue, were not
brought together by community of blood, but by some other cause which
threw them in one another's way. If we accept the Hebrew genealogies,
they need not have had any community of blood nearer than common
descent from Adam and Noah. That is, they need not have been all
children of Shem, of Ham, or of Japheth; some children of Shem, some of
Ham, and some of Japheth may have been led by some cause to settle
together. Or if we believe in independent creations of men, or in the
development of men out of mollusks, the whole of the original society
need not have been descendants of the same man or the same mollusk. In
short, there is no theory of the origin of man which requires us to
believe that the primeval Aryans were a natural family; they may have
been more like an accidental party of fellow-travelers. And if we
accept them as a natural family, it does not follow that the various
branches which grew into separate races and nations, speaking separate
though kindred languages, were necessarily marked off by more immediate
kindred. It may be that there is no nearer kindred in blood between
this or that Persian, this or that Greek, this or that Teuton,