The Aryas before the separation.

 The Aryas, in their early inland home—which, let it be at once understood, is neither India nor the Eran of the Zoroastrians, but some region, not as yet ascertained, though eagerly and patiently sought for,—where the ancestors of both these and many more nations have dwelt as one undivided race for many ages before that ever spying, ever prying spirit of inquiry, which is one of the chief characteristics of our race, first stirred in their settlements. At that moment we already find a people, rude and primitive, but by no means wholly savage or barbarous, nor even what is usually understood by “ a very young people.” For the earliest glimpse it is permitted us to cast into their dwelling-places and mode of life shows them possessed of domestic arts and crafts which, rudimentary as they may appear to us, imply centuries of undisturbed sojourning in the land of their primary choosing, under conditions favoring the training and development of the most essential features of moral and social culture, as well as of material prosperity. A people must have passed out of the purely nomadic stage  1 to be found established in rural homesteads ; nor can it be said to be in its infancy when, after having achieved the momentous transition, it has gone beyond the solitary family life in detached dwellings—huts built on a patch of enclosed land,—-and has learned to cluster these  homestead into villages and boroughs, for mutual protection and assistance,—where their daily life presents the normal and healthful combination of agricultural labor and cattle-breeding, in short the manifold occupations which, in our languages, go under the name  of “ farming,”—without excluding the exercise of hunting, now, however, a relaxation more than a necessity, a means of introducing wholesome variety into the monotony of the daily farm-fare, and also of repelling and destroying the ravenous night-prowlers, the wild creatures of the woods and the desert.  Once arrived at this really advanced stage of culture, the Aryas, like all primitive races, must have advanced rapidly in the work of social organization, for we ever find intellectual improvement developing hand in hand with material prosperity. It is an attractive and instructive task to reconstruct their life from such imperfect and scattered scraps of information as we can dispose of.

The first feature which it pleases us to note in these early settlements of our own, still undivided, race, is the reverence for family ties and duties, firmly established and held sacred. The father acknowledges himself the protector, supporter, and nourisher of his own immediate family ; brothers and sisters live on terms of mutual assistance and cheerful companionship, sharing in the manifold duties of house and farm. The degrees of relationship by marriage are determined to a nicety, and persons connected by this secondary bond are close friends and allies. Thus the family grows into the tribe; the head of the one remains the head, the king, of the other. 1 The several tribes, at first more or less closely related, live, as a rule, on terms of peaceful neighborliness and hospitality. If quarrels do occur and lead to armed strife, they mostly arise out of some dispute about flocks and herds, and, at a later time, out of the competition between kindred tribes striving for supremacy or the appropriation of more land. At the more primitive era the principal occasion of warfare was one calculated to tighten the bond of race rather than loosen it, being self-defence, the constant necessity of guarding against the raids of innumerable, lawless hordes of nomads, mostly of non-Aryan stock, who, mounted on their fleet and indefatigable steppe-ponies, kept continually hovering and circling round the pasture lands and settlements, whose prosperity excited their greed.

Physically, the Aryas, as we can picture them from certain indications, are of high stature, and powerful build, white-skinned, fair-haired, and probably blue-eyed. Ages of seclusion in their first home have moulded these originally local characteristics into a permanent, indelible type, which no amount of uniting with other races will ever be able wholly to obliterate. To the development of this noble physique their mode of life—mostly outdoor labor in moderation—and their favorable surroundings, must have contributed not a little : a temperate climate inclining to the cold, a land of alternate woods and plains, milk-food in abundance, as well as meat and wheat, pastoral and agricultural pursuits,—such   conditions of existence, if continued through many centuries, undisturbed by intercourse with men of different blood and customs, must result in an exceptionally  fine race. Nor are these natural advantages unassisted by art and crafts. The Aryas are promp  and skillful in wielding weapons, which, it is true, are mostly still of hewn and polished stone, shaped and sharpened at an incalculable cost of time and labor but by no means inefficient for all their clumsiness Besides, they have lately learned the use of metals also : gold and silver certainly, and a third metal not fully identified yet—perhaps iron. They can fashion and handle a rude sort of plough, which, uncouth as it is, has not only survived its original inventors, but is still in use in more or less remote parts of every country of Europe, owing to the conservatism and stubbornness of the peasantry all over the world, wherever they have not been brought into direct contact and brisk intercourse with the greater or lesser centre's of trade and traffic. Their garments are made of skins sewed together or of spun and woven wool. They dwell in houses provided with doors, and surrounded by yards, (or gardens), which simply means “ enclosed grounds.” They also have hurdle for their cattle and domestic animals—a necessary addition, for they possess very nearly every kind that we own : horses and asses, sheep and goats, pigs and geese, with the dog to guard them, the mouse to pilfertheir stores, the wolf and the bear to endanger their folds ; they grind their grain, they cook and bake, and have a horror of raw meat. They build boats an skiffs and navigation is known to them, though only on lakes and rivers, for they have never beheld a sea or ocean. Their minds are open to all impressions ; their thoughts are busy with the phenomena of nature ; but in abstract speculation they have not yet reached a very advanced stage—for they can count only up to a hundred.

Such we can picture to ourselves the Aryas, dwelling together as one undivided nation, speaking one language, holding one worship, one mode of life, before they yield to the impulse of migration which has seized on all peoples at certain stages of their existence, when they—whether from want of room, or family discords, or the restlessness of awakening curiosity and unconscious sense of power, or from all these combined—begin to separate, and detachment after detachment leaves the mother trunk, never to return and never again to meet, save in ages to come, mostly as enemies, with no remotest memory of a long severed tie, of a common origin.