THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF EUROPE.

BY JAMES HEATH.

December 14th, 1880.

THE Birmingham Historical Society is, I suppose, founded for the investigation of the history of mankind everywhere and under all circumstances, and it would therefore no doubt welcome a paper by one of its members on the ancient civilization of Egypt or of Assyria, or on the very interesting history of India.

European history however, if not our only, is our principal subject, and I have therefore thought that in this paper I could not do better than discuss the earliest distribution of the nations of Europe and the race affinities which unite or contrast them. And first of all I must ask you to dismiss from your minds the idea that there is any such thing as a division of the human race into Caucasian, Mongolian and so forth. This division was the invention of Blumenbach, who was a professor at the Hanoverian University of Göttingen ninety years ago, and it is unfortunate in more ways than one. Blumenbach had formed a large collection of human skulls, and his notion was that skulls which were alike in appearance and developement must belong to the same race. It was an idea flattering to our self love, for he took the most civilized populations of the world, the nations of modern Europe, the ancient Egyptians, and the Jews, and made of them one race, superior to the rest of mankind. Then he wanted a name for this superior race; the most beautiful skull in his collection was that of a Georgian woman from the Caucasus, and he therefore pitched on Caucasian as the title of the highest type of mankind. But the whole thing is absurd: the Jews, the ancient Egyptians, and the nations of modern Europe belong to three very different divisions of the human family. The word Caucasian was most unfortunate as a title of any race; for the inaccessible mountain range of the

Caucasus has been, and is at this moment, the refuge of the broken remnants of many different races; and the Georgians of the Caucasus, so far from being connected with the European nations, belong to the division of the human family which Blumenbach himself called Mongolian. The fact appears to be that all races in an advanced stage of civilization will have well developed skulls: and that in order to learn the race affinities of mankind we need to study not merely their bodily conformation, which may be influenced by climate and habits, but their history and their language. Taking all these means of arriving at the truth modern Ethnologists say that the European nations belong to the Indo-European, or as it is now generally called the Aryan family of nations. Now what does that mean? In the first place it has nothing to do with the Arian theology supported by Arius the presbyter of the Church in Alexandria. It means the agricultural nations, the ploughing nations, it is derived from the same root as the Latin aro, to plough, the root from which comes in English the word caring in the sense of ploughing in our version of the Bible, "the oxen and the young asses which ear the ground," that is plough the ground, so the earth means originally that which is eared, that which is ploughed, and an oar is that with which you plough the waves. What we mean

is that there was a time when the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, and French, and Germans, and English, and Irish, and Russians, and Poles, and the ancestors of the Persians and of the Hindoos all lived together somewhere in Central Asia as one tribe, or as one knot and bundle of tribes, probably long after many other divisions of the human race had wandered off in quest of distant settlements. They lived together long enough to develop a particular form of language, particular views about religion, particular customs and laws, and even a particular series of legends and nursery tales, before they broke up and separated. They called themselves the ploughing nations as distinguished from the wandering nomad tribes by which they were surrounded and with which they were continually at war, tribes which like the modern Tartars. had no agriculture and no settled habitation, but only flocks and tents, and whom from the word Tura a horse, we call the Turanian