Having to dispose of an "historical difficulty" of such a serious
character, the defendants charged with it can but repeat what they have
already stated; all depends upon the past history and antiquity allowed
to the Indo-Aryan nation. The first step to take is to ascertain how
much History herself knows of that almost prehistoric period when the
soil of Europe had not been trodden yet by the primitive Aryan tribes.
From the latest Encyclopedia down to Professor Max Muller and other
Orientalists, we gather what follows; they acknowledge that at some
immensely remote period, before the Aryan nations got divided from the
parent stock (with the germs of Indo-Germanic languages in them); and
before they rushed asunder to scatter over Europe and Asia in search of
new homes, there stood a "single barbaric (?) people as physical and
political representative of the nascent Aryan race." This people spoke
"a now extinct Aryan language," from which by a series of modifications
(surely requiring more thousands of years than our difficulty-makers are
willing to concede) there arose gradually all the subsequent languages
now spoken by the Caucasian races.
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