Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning | Page 4

and Persians, and the Hindus, and some other peoples who have always remained in Asia. And to the people from whom all these nations have sprung learned men have given two names. Sometimes they are called the Indo-Germanic or Indo-European race, to show how widely they extend; and sometimes they are called the Aryan race, from a word which is found in their language, and which comes from the root "ar," to plough, and is supposed to mean noble, or of a good family.
But how do we know that there were any such people, and that we in England are descended from them, or that they were the forefathers of the other nations of Europe, and of the Hindus, and of the old Greeks and Romans? We know it by a most curious and ingenious process of what may be called digging out and building up. Some of you may remember that years ago there was found in New Zealand a strange-looking bone, which nobody could make anything of, and which seemed to have belonged to some creature quite lost to the world as we know it. This bone was sent home to England to a great naturalist, Professor Owen, of the British Museum, who looked at it, turned it over, thought about it, and then came to the conclusion that it was a bone which had once formed part of a gigantic bird. Then; by degrees, he began to see the kind of general form which such a bird must have presented, and finally, putting one thing to another, and fitting part to part, he declared it to be a bird of gigantic size, and of a particular character, which he was able to describe; and this opinion was confirmed by later discoveries of other bones and fragments, so that an almost complete skeleton of the Dinornis may now be seen in this country. Well, our knowledge of the Aryan people, and of our own descent from them, has been found out in much the same way. Learned men observed, as a curious thing, that in various European languages there were words of the same kind, and having the same root forms; they found also that these forms of roots existed in the older language of Greece; and then they found that they existed also in Sanskrit, the oldest language of India--that in which the sacred books of the Hindus are written. They discovered, further, that these words and their roots meant always the same things, and this led to the natural belief that they came from the same source. Then, by closer inquiry into the Vedas, or Hindu sacred books, another discovery was made, namely, that while the Sanskrit has preserved the words of the original language in their most primitive or earliest state, the other languages derived from the same source have kept some forms plainly coming from the same roots, but which Sanskrit has lost. Thus we are carried back to a language older than Sanskrit, and of which this is only one of the forms, and from this we know that there was a people which used a common tongue; and if different forms of this common tongue are found in India, in Persia, and throughout Europe, we know that the races which inhabit these countries must, at sometime, have parted from the parent stock, and must have carried their language and their traditions along with them. So, to find out who these people were, we have to go back to the sacred books of the Hindus and the Persians, and to pick out whatever facts may be found there, and thus to build up the memorial of the Aryan race, just as Professor Owen built up the great New Zealand bird.
It would take too long, and would be much too dry, to show how this process has been completed step by step, and bit by bit. That belongs to a study called comparative philology, and to another called comparative mythology--that is, the studies of words and of myths, or legends--which some of those who read these pages may pursue with interest in after years. All that need be done now is to bring together such accounts of the Aryan people, our forefathers, as may be gathered from the writings of the learned men who have made this a subject of inquiry, and especially from the works of German and French writers, and more particularly from those of Mr. Max Muller, an eminent German, who lives amongst us in England, who writes in English, and who has done more, perhaps, than anybody else, to tell us what we know about this matter.
As to when the Aryans lived we know nothing, but that it was thousands of years ago, long before history began. As to the