But the question of the houses in which they lived takes us farther back still. At some time, probably before they became acquainted with agricultural modes of livelihood, the Aryans were living a nomadic existence. _Axle_, _nave_, _wheel_, _yoke_, and a common word for ‘waggon’ have convinced people that they once moved from place to place in a kind of primitive caravan, running probably on solid wheels (for there is no common word for ‘spoke’). Now the English word _cove_, which in its Icelandic form means ‘hut’ and in its Greek form (‘gupē’) a subterranean dwelling such as that which was inhabited by the Cyclops, takes us back to a still older form of residence. Again, _wand_ in English means a ‘slender rod’, but in German and Dutch it means a ‘wall’, while the weightier and more solid word _timber_ is connected with the Greek root ‘dem-’ (demein), ‘to build’, Latin ‘domus’, ‘a house’. In these words we can perhaps see the most ancient house rising as time goes on out of a natural cave in the ground to the dignity of a sort of dug-out with wattled sides and roof—eventually to the estate of a firm, wooden hut. And so, behind the picture of our ancestors as they lived together on the spot from which they finally began to spread, we can discern another less certain picture of the very beginnings; of a race, a family perhaps, or some voluntary collection of men not tied by blood, who were together in the Stone Age somewhere in Central Asia. They increase in numbers and power, and, trekking westwards, live—for how many years or centuries we cannot tell—as a race of pastoral nomads, until somewhere in the region of the Dnieper they pass from the wandering nomad existence to some more settled life such as that which has been described. In addition to the somewhat prosaic words from which we have attempted to derive information, it is pleasant to us to think of these ancestors of ours already uttering to one another in that remote past great and simple words like _fire_, _night_, _star_, _thunder_, and _wind_, which our children still learn to use as they grow up. And we must think also how during all this time the new thing, the force, the spirit which the Aryans were to bring into the world, must have been simmering within them. Strengthening their physique through the generations by stricter notions of matrimony, working by exogamy upon their blood, and through that perhaps upon some quality of brightness and sharpness in their thought, the Aryans became. And then they began to move. And the result was the _Bhagavad Gita_, the Parthenon frieze, the Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire—it was Buddha, Michelangelo, the plays of Shakespeare, Bach, Goethe—it was Aristotle and Bacon, the vast modern industrial civilizations of Europe and America, and the British Empire touching the Antipodes. CHAPTER II THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPE _Beech._ _Bard._ _Attic._ _Tragedy._ _Authority._ _Delirious._ _Wine._ _Church._