336 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOCy
of the Aryan civilization Homo Europaus had spread out already into central Europe.
If we trace on a map the known lines of the migrations of the ArN-an peoples, the arrows point as if they had all been shot from a bow in central Europe. The migrations toward India and Iran came from the northwest ; those of the Armenians and the Phrygians from the west ; the Greeks and Latins moved from the north southward, the Gauls and Germans from the northeast toward the southwest, the Scandinavians from the south north- ward, the Slavs from the southwest toward the northeast. The reservoir from which flowed the migrations of the historic period is then limited on the south by the Alps, the Balkans, and the Black Sea. In this region are to be found all the objects the names of which occur in all of the Aryan lan- guages. The philologists have attached great importance to arguments of this latter sort, and the present limitation of the habitat of the beech tree — the name of which is found in all of these languages — to the region west of a line passing through Konigsberg and Odessa convinces them of the occidental origin of the Aryan civilization. As intimated above in another con- nection, I do not place much weight on considerations of this nature. The botanical and zoological areas of distribution vary so much with climatic changes that it is difficult to say where were the extreme limits of distribution of the beech or of the eel seven or eight thousand years ago. I will limit myself, therefore, on this point, to a reference to the works of Penka and his predecessors. Moreover, under our conception that the Aryan civilization developed in no single tribe, but among a number of nomad peoples occupying a large area, and by no means identical or homogeneous in race or culture, it becomes unprofitable to seek for a narrower localization of the origin of that civilization.
PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATION OF THE ARYANS.
The same philological methods make it possible to frame hypotheses of a certain degree of probability in regard to the state of civilization of the Aryan peoples before their differentiation.
