वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

444 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. Prof. Max Muller thinks, progressive, but, for the time at least, necessarily retrogressive savages working only with such residua of the ante-diluvian civilisation as were saved from its general wreck.* But though the Vedic or Aryan people and their religion and culture can thus be traced to the last inter-glacial period, and though we know that the degree of culture attained by the primitive Aryans was of a higher type than some scholars seem to be willing to assign to them, yet there are many points in the primitive Aryan history which still remain unsolved. For instance, when and where the Aryan race was differenti- ated from other human races, or how and where the Aryan speech was developed, are important questions from the anthropological point of view, but we have, at present, no means to answer the same satisfactorily. It is quite possible that other human races might have lived with the Aryans in their home at this time; but the Vedic evidence is silent on this point. The existence of the human race is traced by geologists to the Tertiary era; and it is now geologically cer- tain that the gigantic changes wrought on this globe by glacial epochs were witnessed by man. But anthropology does not supply us with any data from which we can ascertain when, where, or how the human race came to be differenti- ated according to colour or language. On the contrary, it is now proved that at the earliest date at which human remains have been found, the race was already divided into several sharply distinguished types; and this, as observed by Laing, leaves the question of man's ultimate origin completety open to speculation, and enables both monogenists and polygenists to contend for their respective views with plausible argu- ments and without fear of being refuted by facts.† The evid- ence, set forth in the foregoing pages, does not enable us to

• Max Muller's Last Essays, pp. 172 ff. † Laing's Human Origins, pp. 404-5.