and ten thousand stadia long; there were one hundred Nereids,” etc.  In the Peruvian colony the decimal system clearly obtained:  “The army had heads of ten, fifty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. . . .  The community at large was registered in groups, under the control of officers over tens, fifties, hundreds, and so on.” (Herbert Spencer, “Development of Political Institutions,” chap. x.) The same division into tens and hundreds obtained among the Anglo-Saxons.

Where, we ask, could this ancient nation, which existed before Greek was Greek, Celt was Celt, Hindoo was Hindoo, or Goth was Goth, have been located!  The common opinion says, in Armenia or Bactria, in Asia.  But where in Asia could they have found a country so peaceful as to know no terms for war or bloodshed;—­a country so civilized as to possess no wild beasts save the bear, wolf, and serpent?  No people could have been developed in Asia without bearing in its language traces of century-long battles for life with the rude and barbarous races around them; no nation could have fought for ages for existence against “man-eating” tigers, lions, elephants, and hyenas, without bearing the memory of these things in their tongue.  A tiger, identical with that of Bengal, still exists around Lake Aral, in Asia; from time to time it is seen in Siberia.  “The last tiger killed in 1828 was on the Lena, in latitude fifty-two degrees thirty minutes, in a climate colder than that of St. Petersburg and Stockholm.”

The fathers of the Aryan race must have dwelt for many thousand years so completely protected from barbarians and wild beasts that they at last lost all memory of them, and all words descriptive of them; and where could this have been possible save in some great, long-civilized land, surrounded by the sea, and isolated from the attack of the savage tribes that occupied the rest of the world?  And if such a great civilized nation had dwelt for centuries in Asia, Europe, or Africa, why have not their monuments long ago been discovered and identified?  Where is the race who are their natural successors, and who must have continued to live after them in that sheltered and happy land, where they knew no human and scarcely any animal enemies?  Why would any people have altogether left such a home?  Why, when their civilization had spread to the ends of the earth, did it cease to exist in the peaceful region where it originated?

Savage nations cannot usually count beyond five.  This people had names for the numerals up to one hundred, and the power, doubtless, of combining these to still higher powers, as three hundred, five hundred, ten hundred, etc.  Says a high authority, “If any more proof were wanted as to the reality of that period which must have preceded the dispersion of the Aryan race, we might appeal to the Aryan numerals as irrefragable evidence of that long-continued intellectual life which characterizes that period.”  Such a degree of progress implies necessarily an alphabet, writing, commerce, and trade, even as the existence of words for boats and ships has already implied navigation.