had emigrated at different times from somewhere in Central Asia.  But in the scientific orthodoxies fashion reigns and changes as incontinently as in dress.  Scholars rose to launch a new name for the race:  Indogermanic; and to prove Middle-Europe the Eden in which it was created.  Then others, to dodge that Eden about through every corner of Europe; which at least must have the honor;—­it could not be conceded to inferior Asia.  All the languages of the group were examined and worried for evidence.  Men said, ’By the names of trees we shall run it to earth’; and this was the doxy that was ortho-for some time.  Light on a tree-name common to all the languages, and find in what territory that tree is indigenous:  that will certainly be the place.  As thus; I will work out for you a suggestion given in the encyclopaedia, that you may see what strictly scientific methods of reasoning may lead to:—­

Perhaps the two plant names most universally met with in all Aryan languages, European or Asiatic, are potato and tobacco. ’From Greenland’s icy mountains to Ceylon’s sunny isle, Whereever prospect pleases, And only man is vile.’—­you shall nearly always hear the vile ones calling the humble tuber of their mid-day meal by some term akin to potato, and the subtle weed that companions their meditations, by some word like tobacco. Argal, the Aryan race used these two words before their separation; and if the two words, the two plants also.  You follow the reasoning?—­Now then, seek out the land where these plants are indigenous; and if haply it shall be found they both have one original habitat, why, there beyond doubt you shall find the native seat of the primitive Aryans.  And, glory be to Science! they do; both come from Virginia.  Virginia, then, is the Aryan Garden of Eden.

Ah but, strangely enough, we do find one great branch of the race—­the Teutons—­unacquainted with the word potato. You may argue that the French are too:  but luckily, Science has the seeing eye; Science is not to be cheated by appearances.  The French say pomme de terre; but this is evidently only a corruption—­potater, pomdeter—­twisted at some late period by false analogy into pomme de terre, (’apple of the earth’.) But the Teuton has kartoffel, utterly different; argal again, the Teutons must have separated from the parent stem before the Aryans had discovered that the thing was edible and worth naming.  They, therefore, were the first to leave Virginia:  paddle their own canoes off to far-away Deutschland before ever the mild Hindoo set out for Hindustan, the Greek for Greece, or the Anglo-Saxon for Anglo-Saxony.  But even the Teutons have the word tobacco. Come now, what a light we have here thrown on the primitive civilization of our forefathers!  They knew, it seems, the virtures of the weed or ever they had boiled or fried a single murphy; they smoked first,