Thorstein Veblen
The Blond Race and the Aryan Culture

University of Missouri Bulletin, Science Series, vol. 2, no. 3 (Dec., 1913), pp. 
39-57; (= "The Place of Science ...", pp. 477-496)
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[477] It has been argued in an earlier paper (1*) that the blond type or types 
of man (presumably the dolichocephalic blond) arose by mutation from the 
Mediterranean stock during the last period of severe glaciation in Europe. This 
would place the emergence of this racial type roughly coincident with the 
beginning of the European neolithic; the evidence going presumptively to show 
that the neolithic technology came into Europe with the Mediterranean race, at 
or about the same time with that race, and that the mutation which gave rise to 
the dolicho-blond took place after the Mediterranean race was securely settled 
in Europe. Since this blond mutant made good its survival under the 
circumstances into which it so was thrown it should presumably be suited by 
native endowment to the industrial and climatic conditions that prevailed 
through the early phases of the neolithic age in Europe; that is to say, it 
would be a type of man selectively adapted to the technological situation 
characteristic of the early neolithic but lacking as yet the domestic animals 
(and crop-plants?) that presently give much of its character to that culture.
Beginning, then, with the period of the last severe glaciation, and starting 
with this technological equipment, those portions of the European population 
that contained an [478] appreciable and increasing admixture of the blond may be 
conceived to have ranged across the breadth of Europe, particularly in the 
lowlands, in the belt of damp and cool country that fringed the ice, and to have 
followed the receding ice-sheet northward when the general climate of Europe 
began to take on its present character with the returning warmth and dryness. By 
force of the strict climatic limitation to which this type is subject, the blond 
element, and more particularly the dolicho-blond, will presently have 
disappeared by selective elimination from the population of those regions from 
which the ice-sheet and its fringe of cool and humid climate had receded. The 
cool and humid belt suited to the propagation of the blond mutant (and its blond 
hybrids) would shift northward and shorten down to the seaboard as the glacial 
conditions in which it had originated presently ceased. So that presently, when 
Europe finally lost its ice-sheet, the blond race and its characteristic hybrids 
would be found confined nearly within the bounds which have marked its permanent 
extension in historic times. These limits have, no doubt, fluctuated somewhat in 
response to secular variations of climate; but on the whole they appear to have, 
been singularly permanent and singularly rigid.
Apparently after the dolicho-blond had come to occupy the restricted habitat 
which the stock has since continued to hold on the northern seaboard of Europe, 
toward the close of what is known in Danish chronology as the "older stone age," 
the early stock of domestic animals appear to have been introduced into Europe 
from Asia; the like statement will hold more doubtfully for the older staple 
crop plants, with the reservation that their introduction appears to antedate 
that of the domestic animals. At least some such date seems indicated by their 
first ap-[479]pearance in Denmark late in the period of the "kitchen middens." 
Virtually all of these essential elements of their material civilisation appear 
to have come to the blond-hybrid communities settled on the narrow Scandinavian 
waters, as to the rest of Europe, from Turkestan. This holds true at least for 
the domestic animals as a whole, the possible exceptions among the early 
introductions being not of great importance. Some of the early crop plants may 
well have come from what is now Mesopotamian or Persian territory, and may 
conceivably have reached western Europe appreciably earlier, without affecting 
the present argument. If the European horse bad been domesticated in 
palaeolithic times, as appears at least extremely probable, that technological 
gain appears to have been lost before the close of the palaeolithic age; perhaps 
along with the extinction of the European horse.
These new elements of technological equipment, the crop plants and animals, 
greatly affected the character of the neolithic culture in Europe; visibly so as 
regards the region presumably occupied by the dolicho-blond, - or the blond-
hybrid peoples. On the material side of the community's life they would bring 
change direct and immediate, altering the whole scheme of ways and means and 
shifting the pursuit of a livelihood to new lines; and on the immaterial side 
their effect would be scarcely less important, in that the new ways and means 
and the new manner of life requisite and induced by their use would bring on 
certain new institutional features suitable to a system of mixed farming- 
Whatever may have been the manner of their introduction, whether they were 
transmitted peaceably by insensible diffusion from group to group or were 
carried in with a high band by a new intrusive population that overran the 
country and imposed its own cultural scheme upon the Europeans along with [480] 
the new ways and means of life, - in any case these new cultural elements will 
have spread over the face of Europe somewhat gradually and will have reached the 
blondhybrid communities in their remote corner of the continent only after an 
appreciable lapse of time. Yet, it is to be noted, it is after all relatively 
early in neolithic times that certain of the domestic plants and animals first 
come into evidence in the Scandinavian region.
The crop plants appear to have come in earlier than the domestic animals, being 
perhaps brought in by the peoples of the Mediterranean race at their first 
occupation of Europe in late quaternary time. With tillage necessarily goes a 
sedentary manner of life. So that at their first introduction the domestic 
animals were intruded into a system of husbandry carried on by a population 
living in settled communities, and drawing their livelihood in great part from 
the tilled ground but also in part from the sea and from the game-bearing 
forests that covered much of the country at that time. It was into such a 
situation that the domestic animals were intruded on their first coming into 
Europe, - particularly into the seaboard region of north Europe.
On the open ranges of western and central Asia, from which these domestic 
animals came, and even in the hill country of that general region, the peoples 
that draw their livelihood from cattle and sheep are commonly of a nomadic habit 
of life, in the sense that the requirements of forage for their herds and flocks 
bold them to an unremitting round of seasonal migration. It results that, except 
in the broken hill country, these peoples habitually make use of movable 
habitations, live in camps rather than in settled, sedentary communities. 
Certain peculiar institutional arrangements also result from this nomadic manner 
of life associated with the care of flocks and herds [481] on a large scale. But 
on their introduction into Europe the domestic animals appear on the whole not 
to have supplanted tillage and given rise to such a nomadic-pastoral scheme of 
life, exclusively given to cattle raising, but rather to have fallen into a 
system of mixed farming which combined tillage with a sedentary or quasi-
sedentary grazing industry. Such particularly appears to have been the case in 
the seaboard region of the north, where there is no evidence of tillage having 
been displaced by a nomadic grazing industry. Indeed, the small-scale and broken 
topography of this European region has never admitted a large-scale cattle 
industry, such as has prevailed on the wide Asiatic ranges. An exception, at 
least partial and circumscribed, may perhaps be found in the large plains of the 
extreme Southeast and in the Danube valley; and it appears also that grazing, 
after the sedentary fashion, took precedence of tillage in prehistoric Ireland 
as well as here and there in the hilly countries of southern and central Europe.
Such an introduction of tillage and grazing would mean a revolutionary change in 
the technology of the European stone age, and a technological revolution of this 
kind will unavoidably bring on something of a radical change in the scheme of 
Institutions under which the community lives; primarily in the institutions 
governing the details of its economic life, but secondarily also in its domestic 
and civil relations. When such a change comes about through the intrusion of new 
material factors the presumption should be that the range of institutions 
already associated with these material factors in their earlier home will 
greatly influence the resulting new growth of institutions in the new situation, 
even if circumstances may not permit these alien institutions to be brought in 
and put Into effect with the scope and force which they may have had in the 
[482] culture out of which they have come. Some assimilation is to be looked for 
even if circumstances will not permit the adoption of the full scheme of 
institutions, and the institutions originally associated with the intrusive 
technology will be found surviving with least loss or qualification in those 
portions of the invaded territory where the invaders have settled in force, and 
particularly where conditions have permitted them to retain something of their 
earlier manner of life.
The bringers of these new elements of culture, material and immaterial, had 
acquired what they brought with them on the open sheep and cattle ranges of the 
central Asiatic plains and uplands, - as is held to be the unequivocal testimony 
of the Aryan speech, and as is borne out by the latest explorations in that 
region. These later explorations indicate west-central Turkestan as the probable 
center of the domestication and diffusion of the animals, if not also of the 
crop plants, that have stocked Europe. Of what race these bearers of the new 
technology and culture may have been, and just what they brought into Europe, is 
all a matter of inference and surmise. It was once usual to infer, as a ready 
matter of course, that these immigrant pastoral nomads from the Asiatic uplands 
were "Aryans," "Indo-Europeans," "Indo-Germans," of a predominantly blond 
physique. But what has been said above as well as in the earlier paper referred 
to comes near excluding the possibility of these invaders being blonds, or more 
specifically the dolicho-blond. It is, of course, conceivable, with Keane (if 
his speculations on this head are to be taken seriously), that a fragment of the 
alleged blond race from Mauretania may have wandered off into Turkestan by way 
of the Levant, and so may there have acquired the habits of a pastoral life, 
together with the Aryan speech and institutions, and may [483] then presently 
have carried these cultural factors into Europe and imposed them on the European 
population, blond and brunet. But such speculations, which once were allowable 
though idle, have latterly been put out of all question, at least for the 
present, by the recent Pumpelly explorations in Turkestan. It is, for climatic 
reasons, extremely improbable that any blond stock should have inhabited any 
region of the central-Asiatic plains or uplands long enough to acquire the 
pastoral habits of life and the concomitant Aryan speech and institutions, and 
it is fairly certain that the dolicho-blond could not have survived for that 
length of time under the requisite conditions of climate and topography.
It is similarly quite out of the question that the dolichoblond, arising as a 
mutant type late in quaternary time, should have created the Aryan speech and 
culture in Europe, since neither the archaeological evidence nor the known facts 
of climate and topography permit the hypothesis that a pastoral-nomadic culture 
of home growth has ever prevailed in Europe on a scale approaching that required 
for such a result. And there is but little more possibility that the bringers of 
the new (Aryan) culture should have been of the Mediterranean race; although the 
explorations referred to make it nearly certain that the communities which 
domesticated the pastoral animals (and perhaps the crop-plants) in Turkestan 
were of that race. The Mediterranean race originally is Hamitic, not Aryan, it 
is held by men competent to speak on that matter, and the known (presumably) 
Mediterranean prehistoric settlements in Turkestan, at Anau, are moreover 
obviously the settlements of a notably sedentary people following a 
characteristically peaceable mode of life. The population of these settlements 
might of course conceivably have presently acquired the nomadic and preda-
[484]tory habits reflected by the Aryan speech and institutions, but there is no 
evidence of such an episode at Anau, where the finds show an uninterrupted 
peaceable and sedentary occupation of the sites throughout the period that could 
come in question. The population of the settlements at Anau could scarcely have 
made such a cultural innovation, involving the adoption of an alien language, 
except under the pressure of conquest by an invading people; which would involve 
the subjection of the peaceable communities of Anau and the incorporation of 
their inhabitants as slaves or as a servile class in the predatory organisation 
of their masters. The Mediterranean people of Anau could accordingly have had a 
hand in carrying this pastoral-predatory (Aryan) culture into the West only as a 
subsidiary racial element in a migratory community made up primarily of another 
racial stock.
This leaves the probability that an Asiatic stock, without previous settled 
sedentary habits of life, acquired the domesticated animals from the sedentary 
and peaceable communities of Anau, or from some similar village (pueblo) or 
villages of western Turkestan, and then through a (moderately) long experience 
of nomadic pastoral life acquired also the predatory habits and institutions 
that commonly go with a pastoral life on a large scale. These cultural traits 
they acquired in such a degree of elaboration and maturity as is implied by the 
primitive Aryan (or, better, proto-Aryan) speech, including a more or less well 
developed patriarchal system; so that they would presently become a militant and 
migratory community somewhat after the later-known Tatar fashion, and so made 
their way westward as a self-sufficient migratory host and carried the new 
material culture into Europe together with the alien Aryan speech. It is at the 
same time almost unavoidable that in such an [485] event this migratory host 
would have carried with them into the West an appreciable servile contingent 
made up primarily of enslaved captives from the peaceable agricultural 
settlements of the Mediterranean race, which had originally supplied them with 
their stock of domestic animals.
Along with these new technological elements and the changes of law and custom 
which their adoption would bring on, there will also have come in the new 
language that was designed to describe these new ways and means of life and was 
adapted to express the habits of thought which the new ways and means bred in 
the peoples that adopted them. The immigrant pastoral (proto-Aryan) language and 
the pastoral (patriarchal and predatory) law and custom will in some degree have 
been bound up with the technological ways and means out of which they arose, and 
they would be expected to have reached and affected the various communities of 
Europe in somewhat the same time and the same measure in which these material 
facts of the pastoral life made their way among these peoples. In the course of 
the diffusion of these cultural elements, material and immaterial, among the 
European communities the language and in a less degree the domestic and civil 
usages and ideals bred by the habits of the pastoral life might of course come 
to be dissociated from their material or technological basis and might so be 
adopted by remoter peoples who never acquired any large measure of the material 
culture of those pastoral nomads whose manner of life had once given rise to 
these immaterial features of Aryan civilisation.

Certain considerations going to support this far-flung line of conjectural 
history may be set out more in detail:
(a) The Aryan civilisation is of the pastoral type, with [486] such 
institutions, usages and preconceptions as a large-scale pastoral organisation 
commonly involves. Such is said by competent philologists to be the evidence of 
the primitive Aryan speech. It is substantially a servile organisation under 
patriarchal rule, or, if the expression be preferred, a militant or predatory 
organisation; these alternative phrases describe the same facts from different 
points of view. It is characterised by a well-defined system of property rights, 
a somewhat pronounced subjection of women and children, and a masterful 
religious system tending strongly to monotheism. A pastoral culture on the broad 
plains and uplands of a continental region, such as west-central Asia, will 
necessarily fall into some such shape, because of the necessity of an alert and 
mobile readiness for offense and defense and the consequent need of soldierly 
discipline. Insubordination, which is the substance of free institutions, is 
incompatible with a prosperous pastoral-nomadic mode of life. When worked out 
with any degree of maturity and consistency the pastoral-nomadic culture that 
has to do with sheep and cattle appears always to have been a predatory, and 
therefore a servile culture, particularly when drawn on the large scale imposed 
by the topography of the centralAsiatic plains, and reenforced with the use of 
the horse. (The reindeer nomads of the arctic seaboard may appear to be an 
exception, at least in a degree, but they are a special case, admitting a 
particular explanation, and their case does not affect the argument for the 
Aryan civilisation.) The characteristic and pervasive human relation in such a 
culture is that of master and servant, and the social (domestic and civil) 
structure is an organisation of graded servitude, in which no one is his own 
master but the overlord, even nominally. The family is patriarchal, women and 
children are in strict tutelage, and discretion [487] vests in the male head 
alone. If the group grows large its civil institutions are of a like coercive 
character, it commonly shows a rigorous tribal organisation, and in the end, 
with the help of warlike experience, it almost unavoidably becomes a despotic 
monarchy.
It has not been unusual to speak of the popular institutions of Germanic 
paganism - typified, e.g., by the Scandinavian usages of local self-government 
in pagan times - as being typically Aryan institutions, but that is a misnomer 
due to uncritical generalisation guided by a chauvinistic bias. These ancient 
north-European usages are plainly alien to the culture reflected by the 
primitive Aryan Speech, if we are to accept the consensus of the philological 
ethnologists to the effect that the people who used the primitive Aryan speech 
must have been a community of pastoral nomads inhabiting the plains and uplands 
of a continental region. That many of these philological ethnologists also hold 
to the view that these Aryans were north-European pagan blonds may raise a 
personal question of consistency but does not otherwise touch the present 
argument.
(b) A racial stock that has ever been of first-rate consequence in the ethnology 
of Europe (the Alpine, brachycephalic brunet, the homo alpinus of the Linnean 
scheme) comes into Europe at this general period, from Asia; and this race is 
held to have presently made itself at home, if not dominant, throughout middle 
Europe, where it has in historic times unquestionably been the dominant racial 
element.
(c) The pastoral-nomadic institutions spoken of above appear to have best made 
their way in those regions of Europe where this brachycephalic brunet stock has 
been present in some force if not as a dominant racial factor. The evidence is 
perhaps not conclusive, but there is at [488] least a strong line of suggestion 
afforded by the distribution of the patriarchal type of institutions within 
Europe, including the tribal and gentile organisation. There is a rough 
concomitance between the distribution of these cultural elements presumably 
derived from an Aryan source on the one hand, and the distribution past or 
present of the brachycephalic brunet type on the other hand. The regions where 
this line of institutions are known to have prevailed in early times are, in the 
main, regions in which the Alpine racial type is also known to have been present 
in force, as, e.g., in the classic Greek and Roman republics.
At the same time a gentile organisation seems also to have been associated from 
the outset with the Mediterranean racial stock and may well have been comprised 
in the institutional furniture of that race as it stood before the advent of the 
Alpine stock; but the drift of later inquiry and speculation on this head 
appears to support the view that this Mediterranean gentile system was of a 
matrilinear character, such as is found in many extant agricultural communities 
of the lower barbarian culture, rather than of a patriarchal kind, such as 
characterises the pastoral nomads. The northern blond communities alone appear, 
on the available evidence, to have had no gentile or tribal institutions, 
whether matrilinear or patriarchal. The classic Greek and Roman communities 
appear originally to have been of the Mediterranean race and to have always 
retained a broad substratum of the Mediterranean stock as the largest racial 
element in their population, but the Alpine stock was also largely represented 
in these communities at the period when their tribal and gentile institutions 
are known to have counted for much, as, indeed, it has continued ever since.
Apart from these communities of the Mediterranean seaboard, the peoples of the 
Keltic culture appear to have [489] had the tribal and gentile system, together 
with the patriarchal family, in more fully developed form than it is to be found 
in Europe at large. The peoples of Keltic speech are currently believed by 
ethnologists to have originally been of a blond type, although opinions are not 
altogether at one on that head, - the tall, perhaps red-haired, brachycephalic 
blond, the "Saxon" of Beddoe, the "Oriental" of Deniker. But this blond type is 
perhaps best accounted for as a hybrid of the dolicho-blond crossed on the 
Alpine brachycephalic brunet. Some such view of its derivation is fortified by 
what is known of the prehistory and the peculiar features of the early Keltic 
culture. This culture differs in some respects radically from that of the 
dolicho-blond communities, and it bears more of a resemblance to the culture of 
such a brunet group of peoples as the early historic communities of upper and 
middle Italy. If the view is to be accepted which is coming into currency 
latterly, that the Keltic is to be affiliated with the culture of Hallstatt and 
La Tène, such affiliation will greatly increase the probability that it is to be 
counted as a culture strongly influenced if not dominated by the Alpine stock. 
The Hallstatt culture, lying in the valley of the Danube and its upper 
affluents, lay in the presumed westward path of immigration of the Alpine stock; 
its human remains are of a mixed character, showing a strong admixture of the 
brachycephalic brunet type; and it gives evidence of cultural gains due to 
outside influence in advance of the adjacent regions of Europe. This Keltic 
culture, then, as known to history and prehistory, runs broadly across middle 
Europe along the belt where blond and brunet elements meet and blend; and it has 
some of the features of that predatory-pastoral culture reflected by the 
primitive Aryan speech, in freer development, or in better preservation, than 
the adjacent cultural regions [490] to the north; at the same time the peoples 
of this Keltic culture show more of affiliation to or admixture with the 
brachycephalic brunet than the other blond-hybrid peoples do.
On the other hand the communities of dolicho-blond hybrids on the shores of the 
narrow Scandinavian waters, remote from the centers of the Alpine culture, show 
little of the institutions peculiar to a pastoral people. These dolicho-blond 
hybrids of the North come into history at a later date, but with a better 
preserved and more adequately recorded paganism than the other barbarians of 
Europe. The late-pagan Germanic-Scandinavian culture affords the best available 
instance of archaic dolicho-blond institutions, if not the sole instance; and it 
is to be noted that among these peoples the patriarchal system is weak and 
vague, - women are not in perpetual tutelage, the discretion of the male head of 
the household is not despotic nor even unquestioned, children are not held under 
paternal discretion beyond adult age, the patrimony is held to no clan 
liabilities and is readily divisible on inheritance, and so forth. Neither is 
there any serious evidence of a tribal or gentile system among these peoples, 
early or late, nor are any of them, excepting the late and special instance of 
the Icelandic colony, known ever to have been wholly or mainly of pastoral 
habits; indeed, they are known to have been without the pastoral animals until 
some time in the neolithic period. The only dissenting evidence on these heads 
is that of the Latin writers, substantially Caesar and Tacitus, whose testimony 
is doubtless to be thrown out as incompetent in view of the fact that it is 
supported neither by circumstantial evidence nor by later and more authentic 
records. In speaking of "tribes" among the Germanic hordes these Latin writers 
are plainly construing Germanic facts in Roman terms, [491] very much as the 
Spanish writers of a later day construed Mexican and Peruvian facts in 
mediaeval-feudalistic terms,-to the lasting confusion of the historians; whereas 
in enlarging on the pastoral habits of the Germanic communities they go entirely 
on data taken from bodies of people on the move and organised for raiding, or 
recently and provisionally settled upon a subject population presumably of 
Keltic derivation or of other alien origin and inhabiting the broad lands of 
middle Europe remote from the permanent habitat of the dolicho-blond. Great 
freedom of assumption has been used and much ingenuity has been spent in 
imputing a tribal system to the early Germanic peoples, but apart from the 
sophisticated testimony of these classical writers there is no evidence for it. 
The nearest approach to a tribal or a gentile organisation within this culture 
is the "kin," which counts for something in early Germanic law and custom; but 
the kin is far from being a gens or clan, and it will be found to have more of 
the force of a clan organisation the farther it has strayed from the 
Scandinavian center of diffusion of the dolicho-blond and the more protracted 
the warlike discipline to which the wandering host has been exposed. All these 
properly Aryan institutions are weakest or most notably wanting where the blond 
is most indubitably in evidence.
Taking early Europe as a whole, it will appear that among the European peoples 
at large institutions of the character reflected in the primitive Aryan speech 
and implied in the pastoral-nomadic life evidenced by the same speech are 
relatively weak, ill-defined or wanting, arguing that Europe was never fully 
Aryanised. And the peculiar geographical and ethnic distribution of this 
Aryanism of institutions argues further that the dolicho-blond culture of the 
Scandinavian region was less profoundly affected [492] by the Aryan invasion 
than any other equally well known section of Europe. What is known of this 
primitive Aryan culture, material, domestic, civil and religious, through the 
Sanskrit and other early Asiatic sources, may convincingly be contrasted with 
what is found in early Europe. These Asiatic records, which are our sole 
dependence for a competent characterisation of the Aryan culture, shows it to 
have resembled the culture of the early Hebrews or that of the pastoral 
Turanians more closely than it resembles the early European culture at large, 
and greatly more than it resembles the known culture of the early communities of 
dolicho-blond hybrids.
(d) Scarcely more conclusive, but equally suggestive, is the evidence from the 
religious institutions of the Aryanised Europeans. As would be expected in any 
predatory civilisation, such as the pastoral-nomadic cultures typically are, the 
Aryan religious system is said to have leaned strongly toward a despotic 
monarchical form, a hierarchically graded polytheism, culminating in a despotic 
monotheism. There is little of all this to be found in early pagan Europe. The 
nearest well-known approach to anything of the kind is the late-Greek scheme of 
Olympian divinities with Zeus as a doubtful suzerain, - known through latter-day 
investigations to have been superimposed on an earlier cult of a very different 
character. The Keltic (Druidical) system is little known, but it is perhaps not 
beyond legitimate conjecture, on the scant evidence available, that this system 
had rather more of the predatory, monarchical-despotic cast than the better 
known pagan cults of Europe. The Germanic paganism, as indicated by the late 
Scandinavian - which alone is known in any appreciable degree -was a lax 
polytheism which imputed little if any coercive power to the highest god, and 
which was not taken so very seriously anyway [493] by the "worshipers," - if 
Snorri's virtually exclusive account is to be accepted without sophistication. 
The evidence accorded by tile religious cults of Europe yields little that is 
conclusive, beyond throwing the whole loosejointed, proliferous European 
paganism out of touch with anything that can reasonably be called Aryan. And 
this in spite of the fact that all the available evidence is derived from the 
European cults as they stood after having been exposed to long centuries of 
Aryanisation. So that it may well be held that such systematisation of myths and 
observances as these European cults give evidence of, and going in the direction 
of a despotic monotheism, is to be traced to the influence of the intrusive 
culture of the Aryan or Aryanised invaders, - as is fairly plain in the instance 
of the Olympians.
(e) That the languages of early Europe, so far as known, belong almost 
universally to the Aryan family may seem an insurmountable obstacle to the view 
here spoken for. But the difficulties of the case are not appreciably lessened 
by so varying the hypothesis as to impute the Aryan speech to the dolicho-blond, 
or to any blond stock, as its original bearer. Indeed, the difficulties are 
increased by such an hypothesis, since the Aryan-speaking peoples of early 
times, as of later times, have in the main been communities made up of brunets 
without evidence of a blond admixture, not to speak of an exclusively blond 
people. (There is no evidence of the existence of an all-blond people anywhere, 
early or late.)
The early European situation, so far as known, offers no exceptional obstacles 
to the diffusion of an intrusive language. Certain mass movements of population, 
or rather mass movements of communities shifting their ground by secular 
progression, are known to have taken place, as, e.g., in the case of the 
Hallstatt-La Tène-Keltic [494] culture moving westward on the whole as it gained 
ground and spread by shifting and ramification outward from its first-known seat 
in the upper Danube valley. All the while, as this secular movement of growth, 
ramification and advance was going on, the Hallstatt-La Tène-Keltic peoples 
continued to maintain extensive trade relations with the Mediterranean seaboard 
and the Aegean -on the one side and reaching the North-Sea littoral on the other 
side. In all probability it is by trade relations of this kind - chiefly, no 
doubt, through trade carried on by itinerant merchants -that the new speech made 
its way among the barbarians of Europe; and it is no far-fetched inference that 
it made its way, in the North at least, as a trade jargon. All this accords with 
what is going on at present under analogous circumstances. The superior merit by 
force of which such a new speech would make its way need be nothing more 
substantial than a relatively crude syntax and phonetics - such as furthers the 
dissemination of English to-day in the form of Chinook jargon, Pidgin English, 
and Beach la Mar. Such traits, which might in some other light seem blemishes, 
facilitate the mutilation of such a language into a graceless but practicable 
trade jargon. With jargons as with coins the poorer (simpler) drives out the 
better (subtler and more complex). A second, and perhaps the chief, point of 
superiority by virtue of which a given language makes its way as the dominant 
factor in such a trade jargon, is the fact that it is the native language of the 
people who carry on the trade for whose behoof the jargon is contrived. The 
traders, coming in contact with many men, of varied speech, and carrying their 
varied stock of trade goods, will impose their own names for the articles 
bartered and so contribute that much to the jargon vocabulary,- and a jargon is 
at its inception little more than a vocabulary.
[495] The traders at the same time are likely to belong to the people possessed 
of the more efficient technology, since it is the superior technology that 
commonly affords them their opportunity for advantageous trade; hence the new or 
intrusive words, being the names of new or intrusive facts, will in so far find 
their way unhindered into current speech and further the displacement of the 
indigenous language by the jargon.
Such a jargon at the outset is little else than a vocabulary comprising names 
for the most common objects and the most tangible relations. On this simple but 
practicable framework new varieties of speech will develop, diversified locally 
according to the kind and quantity of materials and linguistic tradition 
contributed by the various languages which it supplants or absorbs.
In so putting forward the conjecture that the several forms of Aryan speech have 
arisen out of trade jargons that have run back to a common source in the 
language of an intrusive proti-Aryan people, and developing into widely 
diversified local and ethnic variants according as the mutilated proto-Aryan 
speech (vocabulary) fell into the hands of one or another of the indigenous 
barbarian peoples,- in this suggestion there is after all nothing substantially 
novel beyond giving a collective name to facts already well accepted by the 
philologists. Working backward analytically step by step from the mature results 
given in the known Aryan languages they have discovered and divulged - with what 
prolixity need not be alluded to here - that in their beginnings these several 
idioms were little else than crude vocabularies covering the commonest objects 
and most tangible relations, and that by time-long use and wont the uncouth 
strings of vocables whereby the beginners of these languages sought to express 
themselves have been worked down through a [496] stupendously elaborate fabric 
of prefixes, infixes and suffixes, etc., etc., to the tactically and 
phonetically unexceptionable inflected languages of the Aryan family as they 
stood at their classical best. And what is true of the European languages should 
apparently hold with but slight modification for the Asiatic members of the 
family. These European idioms are commonly said to be, on the whole, less true 
to the pattern of the inferentially known primitive Aryan than are its best 
Asiatic representatives; as would be expected in case the latter were an 
outgrowth of jargons lying nearer the center of diffusion of the proto-Aryan 
speech and technology.
As regards the special case of the early north-European communities of dolicho-
blond hybrids, the trade between the Baltic and Danish waters on the one hand 
and the Danube valley, Adriatic and Aegean on the other hand is known to have 
been continued and voluminous during the neolithic and bronze ages, - as counted 
by the Scandinavian chronology. In the course of this traffic, extending over 
many centuries and complicated as it seems to have been with a large 
infiltration of the brachycephalic brunet type, much might come to pass in the 
way of linguistic substitution and growth.

NOTES:
1) "The Mutation Theory and the Blond Race," in The Journal of Race Development, 
April, 1913.
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