fellow citizens in knowledge, and appropriated all the advantages of the society to themselves.

"The different appearance of the higher classes from the Sudras, which is so observable to this day, might incline us to think them foreigners; but without entirely denying this argument (as far at least as relates to the Brahmins and Cshetriyas), we must advert to some considerations which greatly weaken its force.

83

"The class most unlike the Brahmins are the Chandalas, who are nevertheless originally the offspring of a Brahmin mother, and who might have been expected to have preserved their resemblance to their parent stock, as, from the very lowness of their caste, they are prevented mixing with any race but their own.8 Difference of habits and employments is, of itself, sufficient to create as great a dissimilarity as exists between the Brahmin and the Sudra; and the hereditary separation of professions in India would contribute to keep up and to increase such a distinction.

"It is opposed to their foreign origin, that neither in the Code [of Manu], nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any book that is certainly older than the Code, is there any allusion to a prior residence, or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India. Even mythology goes no further than the Himalaya chain, in which is fixed the habitation of the gods.

"The common origin of the Sanskrit language with those of the West leaves no doubt that there was once a connexion between the nations by whom they are used; but it proves nothing regarding the place where such a connexion subsisted, nor about the time, which might have been in so early a stage of their society as to prevent its throwing any light on the history of the individual nations. To say that it spread from a central point is a gratuitous assumption, and even contrary to analogy; for emigration and civilization have not spread in a circle, but from east to west. Where, also, could the central point be, from which a language could spread over India, Greece, and Ituly, and yet leave Chaldea, Syria, and Arabia untouched?

83 [See the first volume of this work, 2nd edition, p. 481, and Manu x. 12, there quoted. It is clear, however, that we are not to take these accounts of the formation of the different castes, written at a time when the Brahmanical system was fully developed, and in the interest of its defenders, as furnishing the true history of their origin. See Lassen, Ind. Ant., 1st ed., i. 407, and 2nd ed., pp. 485, f.—J. M.]

"The question, therefore, is still open. There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one; and as little for denying that they may have done so before the earliest trace of their records or traditions." 84

Mr. Elphinstone then proceeds to explain how he thinks castes may have originated.

SECT. VII.-Central Asia the cradle of the Arians: opinions of Schlegel, Lassen, Benfey, Hüller, Spiegel, Renan, and Pictet.

These views of Mr. Curzon, of which I have given a summary in the preceding section, are opposed to the general consent of European scholars. A. W. von Schlegel, Lassen, Benfey, Müller, Weber, Roth, Spiegel, Renan, and Pictet, however differing on other points, all concur in this, that the cradle of the Indians, as well as of the other branches of the Indo-Germanic race, is to be sought for in some country external to India.

I shall proceed to give some extracts from the writings of these eminent authors; and shall finish with a summary of the arguments which seem to carry most weight in favour of the conclusion which they have adopted.

The first authority whom I shall cite is A. W. von Schlegel, who, in an essay "On the Origin of the Hindus," systematically discusses the question under consideration in all its bearing. He treats of the migratory movements of ancient nations, of the traditions of the Hindus regarding their own origin, of the diversities of races, of the physiological character of the Hindus and of the indigenous Indian tribes, of the bearing of comparative philology on the history of nations, on the relations of the Arian languages to each other, and finally deduces the results to which he is led by the convergence of all these various lines of investigation. As I have already treated at length of some of these subjects, I shall only cite two passages, the first of which furnishes a reply to Mr. Curzon's argument against

84 See Appendix, note G.

85 De l'Origine des Hindous, published originally in the second volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, London, 1834; and reprinted in his Essais Littéraires et Historiques, Bonn, 1842.

the immigration of the Hindus from any foreign region, drawn from the absence of any national tradition to that effect. It is as follows:

"In inquiring into the birth-place of any people, and into the route by which, and the period at which, they have travelled to their present abodes, we are naturally tempted, first of all, to interrogate the popular tradition on these points: but if we do so, it may easily happen that either no answer at all, or a false one, will be obtained. An illiterate people, ignorant of writing, which has adopted a stationary life, after a long and arduous migration, might, after a few centuries, easily lose all recollection of its change of habitation: or, if certain vestiges of such a change were preserved, it might be impossible for a people so circumstanced to indicate with precision the point of departure; as for this purpose a general knowledge of the shape of continents and of seas would be necessary. It has often happened that tribes in a barbarous state have emigrated, either impelled by necessity, or to avoid some powerful neighbour. The utmost that such tribes could do might be to direct their journey with tolerable exactness according to the four cardinal points: shaping their course so as to avoid any unexpected difficulties which might arise, they would suffer themselves to be guided by chance; and their only measure of distance would be the fatigue and the duration of their march." (Essais, p. 444.) The following is the passage in which Schlegel sums up the results of his researches::

"If we admit (and it is my conviction that the more deeply the subject is investigated the more indubitable will the conclusion appear) that the derivation of the [Indo-European] languages from one common parent justifies the inference that the nations who spoke them also issued from one common stock; that their ancestors, at a certain epoch, belonged to one sole nation, which became divided and subdivided as its expansion proceeded;-the question naturally arises, what was the primeval seat of that parent nation? It is nowise probable that the migrations which have peopled so large a part of the globe should have commenced at its southern extremity, and have been constantly directed from that point towards the north-west. On the contrary, every thing concurs to persuade us that the colonies set out from a central region in divergent directions. According to this supposition, the distances which the colonists would have to traverse up to the

time of their definitive establishment, become less immense; the vicissitudes of climate to which they were exposed, become less abrupt, and many of the emigrant tribes would thus make an advantageous exchange, as regards fertility of soil and the temperature of the air. And where is this central country to be sought for, if not in the interior of the great continent, in the neighbourhood, and to the east of the Caspian Sea? It may perhaps be objected that the country in question is now occupied by people of a different race: but to how many countries has it not happened to undergo a total change of their inhabitants? The prolific parent-country of so many swarms of expatriated colonists might, from that very circumstance, be converted into a desert. It is probable that, since the commencement of history, the nature of this country has changed, and that in former times it was more favourable than now to agriculture and to population. According to my hypothesis, then, the ancestors of the Persians and Hindus must have emigrated from their early seats towards the south-west and the south-east; and the forefathers of the European nations towards the west and the north. I conceive that the tribes which migrated towards Europe followed two great routes; the one along the northern shores of the Black Sea; while the other traversed Asia Minor, and crossed the Egean Sea, or the Hellespont, Thrace, Illyria, and the Adriatic. It was indubitably by this latter route that Greece and Italy received their colonists.” (Essais, p. 514-517.)

Professor Lassen also decides against the hypothesis that India was the birth-place of the Indo-European races. He says: 86

"It is, as we have seen, a result of modern investigation that the ancient language of the Indians is so intimately related to those of the other Indo-Germanic nations as to establish the original unity both of these languages and nations. We are therefore driven to the conclusion either-1st, that the Indians migrated to India from some other primeval seat; or, 2nd, that all the kindred Indo-Germanic nations had their origin in India. The following considerations determine us to decide in favour of the former of these alternatives.

"It would, first, be an improbable supposition that the nations which are now so widely extended should have been derived from the es Indian Antiquities, first edition, p. 512, ff.; second edition, p. 613.

remotest member of the entire series. Their common cradle must be sought, if not in the very centre, at all events in such a situation as to render a diffusion towards the different regions of the world practicable. This condition is not well fulfilled by supposing India to be the point of departure. Secondly, none of the phenomena of speech, customs, or ideas observable among the other cognate nations indicate an Indian origin. Of the countries which were anciently occupied by the great Indo-Germanic family, India was the most peculiar, and differed the most widely from the others; and it would be very unaccountable that no trace of these Indian peculiarities should have been preserved by any Celtic race in later times, if they had all originally dwelt in India. Among the names of plants and animals which are common to all these nations there is none which is peculiar to India. The most widely diffused word for any species of corn (yava) denotes not rice, but barley. Thirdly, for a decision of this question, the manner in which India is geographically distributed among the different nations by which it is occupied is of great importance. The diffusion of the Arians towards the south points to the conclusion that they came from the north-west, from the country to the north of the Vindhya, probably from the region bordering on the Jumna, and the eastern part of the Punjab. Their extension to the east, between the Himalaya and the Vindhya, also indicates the same countries as their earlier seats. We find, moreover, evident traces of the Arians, in their advance from the north-west, having severed asunder the earlier population of Hindustan, and driven one portion of it towards the northern, and another portion towards the southern, hills. Further, we cannot assume that the Arians themselves were the earlier inhabitants who were pushed aside; for the inhabitants of the Dekhan, like those of the Vindhya range, appear always as the weaker and retiring party, who were driven back by the Arians. We cannot ascribe to the non-Arian tribes the power of having forced themselves forward through the midst of an earlier Arian population to the seats which they eventually occupied in the centre of the country; but, on the contrary, everything speaks in favour of their having been

87 [This circumstance, however, might be accounted for, as Weber remarks (Modern Investigations on Ancient India, p. 10), by the names being forgotten, from the plants and animals being unknown in western countries. See further on.-J.M.]