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

18 . THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS.
globe. The only other alternative is to assume that one of the
four Neolithic races in Europe developed a civilisation quite
independently of their neighbours, an assumption, which is impro-
bable on its face. Although, therefore, we may, in the light of
recent scientific discoveries, give up the theory of successive
migrations into Europe from a common home of the Aryan race
in Central Asia in early times, yet the question of the primeval
home of the Aryan race, a question with which we are mainly
concerned in this book, still remains unsolved. When and where
the primitive Aryan tongue was developed is again another
difficult question which is not satisfactorily answered. Canon
Taylor, after comparing the Aryan and Ural-Altaic languages,
hazards a conjecture that at the close of the reindeer, or the last
period of the Palæolithic age, a Finnic people appeared in
Western Europe, whose speech remaining stationary is represent-
ed by the agglutinative Basque, and that much later, at the be-
ginning of the pastoral age, when the ox had been tamed, a taller
and more powerful Finno-Ugric people developed in Central
Europe the inflexive Aryan speech.* But this is merely a
conjecture, and it does not answer the question how the Indo-
Iranians with their civilisation are found settled in Asia at a time
when Europe was in the Neolithic age. The Finnic language
again discloses a number of culture words borrowed from the
Aryans, and it is unlikely that the language of the latter could
have got its inflection from the Finnic language. A mere similarity
of inflectional structure is no evidence whatsoever for deciding
who borrowed from whom, and it is surprising that the above
suggestion should come from scholars, who have assailed the
theory of successive Aryan migrations from a common Asiatic
home, a theory which, amongst others, was based on linguistic
grounds. Why did the Finns twice migrate from their home is also

• The Origin of the Aryans, p. 296.