The leading part in the history of the world has been, and is still,
played by the Aryan nations. The Caucasian presents us with the highest
type among the five families of man; the Aryan branch of the Caucasian
family presents us with the noblest pattern of that highest type.
The Aryan branch includes nearly all the present and past nations of
Europe, the Greeks, Latins, Teutons or Germans, Celts and Slavonians; as
well as three Asiatic peoples,--the Hindus, the Persians, and the
Afghans and the modern Americans. It is the Aryans that have been the
parents of new nations, and that have reached the highest point of
intellectual development, as shown in their political freedom, and in
their science, literature, and art.
The term Aryan is derived either from one ancient word implying that
they were “cultivators of the soil,” or from another meaning “worthy,
noble.” There was a time when these ancestors of the Celts, the Germans,
the Slavonians, the Greeks and Italians, the Persians, the Hindus, and
of nearly all the European nations, were living together, separate from
the ancestors of the Semitic race. Their earliest known home was the
high tableland of central Asia, north and northwest of the Himalaya
Mountains, near the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers.
Through pressure of numbers, and spurred on by their own enterprising
nature, these Aryan peoples for ages moved mainly westward, from their
ancestral seats. A branch went southward across the Himalayas, and
peopled Hindustan, Persia, and the intervening lands; another branch at
different times and long intervals moved westward into Europe.
The Celts were the first European emigrants and spread themselves over a
great part of the continent; as a distinct people they are now only
found in parts of the British Isles and France. Later came the Italic
(_Latin_) tribes who possessed the peninsula now known as Italy; the
Hellenic (or _Grecian_) tribes, who occupied the peninsula of Greece;
the Teutonic tribes, who replaced the Celts in central Europe, and
finally also occupied Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula (Sweden and
Norway). The last of the Aryans were the Slavonians, now spread over
Russia, Poland, and Bohemia, and the Lithuanians, settled on the Baltic
coast, partly in Prussia, partly in Russia. Thus was Europe gradually
overspread by successive waves of Aryan settlement.