and only ate long afterwards:  and the Germans who led that first expedition out from the fatherland of the race, must have gone with full tobacco-pouches and empty lunch-bags.  What a life-like picture rises before our eyes!  These first Aryans were a dreamy contemplative people; tobacco was the main item in their lives, the very basis of their civilization.—­Then presently, after the Teutons had gone, someone must have let his pipe go out for a few minutes—­long enought to discover that he was hungry, and that a fair green plant was growing at his door, with a succulent tuber at the root of it which one could EAT.  Think of the joy, the wonder, of that momentous discovery!  Did he hide it away, lest others should be as happy as himself?  Were ditectives set to watch him, to spy out the cause of a habit of sleek rotundity that was growing upon him at last visibly?  We shall never know.  Or did he call in his neighbors at once and annouce it?  Did someone ask:  ’What shall we name this God-given thing?’—­and did another reply:  ’It looks to me like a potato; let’s call it that!’?  That at least must have been how it came by it name.  They received the suggestion with acclamations:  and all future out-going expeditions took sacks of it with them; and their descendants have continued to call it potato to this day.  For you must not that being the only food with a name common to all the languages—­or almost all —­it must be supposed to have been the only food they knew of before their separation.  Even the words for father, mother, fire, water, and the like, have a greater number of different roots in the Aryan languages than have these blessed two.

To say the truth, a dawning perception of the possibilities of this kind of reasoning chilled the enthusiasm of the Aryan-hunters a good deal; it was the bare bodkin that did quietus make for much philological pother and rout.  No; if you are to prove racial superiority or exclusiveness, you had much better avail yourself of the simplicity of a stout bludgeon, than rely upon the subtleties of brain-mind argumentation; for time past is long, and mostly hidden; and lots of things have happened to account for your proofs in ways you would never suspect.  The long and short of it is, that after pursuing the primitive Aryans up hill and down dale through all parts of Europe, Science is forced to pronouce her final judgement thus:  We really know nothing about it.

The ancestors of this Fifth Root-Race emigrated to Central Asia to escape the fate of Atlantis; whither too went several Atlantean peoples, such as the forefathers of the Chinese,—­who were not destined to be destroyed.  It is a vast region, and there was room for them all.  That emigration may have been as long a process as that of the Europeans in our own time to America; probably it was; or longer.  But it happened, at any rate, a million years ago; and in a million years a deal of water will flow under