In spite of this, Max Müller does not seem to have bestowed that attention upon them, for I can find nothing either in confirmation or contradiction of the theory. He at once goes off at a tangent on the comparative inter-relations of the various Aryan _languages_ among themselves, but on the supposed European origin of the Aryan _race_ he is silent. I think it just possible that Max Müller may have wished to pay Benfey a compliment without committing himself to an endorsement of his views. Benfey had been strongly recommended to him by Bunsen, his own great friend and patron, for whom he cherished the most grateful affection. In a letter, dated from Heidelberg, February 26th, 1855, Bunsen writes: “I wish you would take advantage of my communication to put yourself into correspondence with Benfey. He is well disposed towards you, and has openly spoken of you as the ‘apostle of German science in England.’ And then he stands infinitely higher than the present learned men of his department.” The desire to please Bunsen would account for Max Müller’s faint praise of Benfey’s theory, but its adoption would have seemed nothing less than the negation of all that he had so long striven to teach. (Cf. “Chips from a German Workshop,” Vol. III., page 469.) Of Omalius d’Halloy, Latham and the rest, Max Müller seems to take no heed. At any rate, I do not find them mentioned either in the “Chips” or in the lectures on the Science of Language. I, for my part, should as soon accept the doctrine, in which I saw the other day that there is still here and there a believer, that the world is a flat surface, justifying the terrors of the sailors of Columbus lest, when they reached the extreme west, they should topple over, ship and all, into space or Hades, by whatever name you choose to call it. To some men disputation and contradiction are an intellectual necessity—witness the beliefs that Bacon wrote _Romeo and Juliet_, and that Homer was an unlimited liability company of prehistoric ballad-mongers. According to the ethnological faith in which I have lived for the last sixty years, there existed in times so remote that they go back beyond the birth of chronology a white folk of shepherds and husbandmen who fed their flocks and tilled the soil in the valleys of the Highlands of Central Asia. There they increased and multiplied until the land of their birth could no longer hold them, and their pastures became insufficient for their flocks and herds. Then began their many wanderings. Toughened by a climate in which they had to live under most trying conditions of burning heat and extreme cold, they were a hardy race, having little to fear from the opposition of the weaker tribes who might seek to bar their way.