Naturally the question of the identity of the Aryan race was soon a subject of keen debate. The French and German schools at once assumed opposite sides, the Germans claiming that the Aryans were tall, fair, and long-headed, the ancestors of the modern Teutons; and the French, mainly on cultural evidence, claiming that the language, together with civilisation, came into Europe with the Alpine race, which forms such a large element in the modern French population. There are two ways in which linguistics may be studied as an aid to Anthropology—first, with regard to structural analysis, by which linguistic affinities may be proved; secondly, by what has been called “linguistic palæontology,” or the study of root words, by means of which the original culture of a people may be ascertained. Philology pushed both these methods too far. It claimed the right, by proof of structural analysis, to link up the racial relationships of the European and Asiatic peoples, and, by linguistic palæontology, to determine the culture of the original “Aryans,” and to identify their original home. It was over the question of the “Aryan cradle” that they were forced to relinquish their too ambitious claims. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was generally believed that our first ancestors were created in 4004 B.C. and spoke Hebrew, and that the origin of the European languages dated from the migration of Japhet from the plains of Shinar, _cir._ 2247. The Asiatic origin of race and language was for long unchallenged. But in 1839 Omalius d’Halloy, followed by Latham in 1851, began to cast doubts on the Asiatic “cradle,” noting that the Asiatic languages had no real claim to be considered older than those of Europe, and that in many ways the Lithuanian and Armenian were the most archaic in the family. More important still was the work of Benfey,[125] who may be regarded as the originator of linguistic palæontology, and who used its evidence to shift the original dispersal from Asia to Europe. Various philologists followed, employing different methods to prove different theories; and the Aryan cradle was located in many parts of Europe and Asia, ranging from the Pamir plateau to the Baltic plains. Max Müller confessed in 1888 that “the evidence is so pliant that it is possible to make out a more or less plausible case” for almost any part of the world. Footnote 125: T. Benfey, in preface to Fick’s _Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Indogermanischen Sprachen_, 1868. [Sidenote: =Language and Race.=] From claiming too much the swing of the pendulum brought linguistics into disrepute with ethnologists, and for a time the evidence of language was looked upon with suspicion. Even philologists were accused of going too far in this direction.