The Aryan controversy had its origin at the close of the eighteenth century, when that distinguished Oriental scholar Sir William Jones, who acted for a period as a judge of the Supreme Court in Bengal, drew attention to the remarkable resemblances between the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, and Celtic languages. In 1808, Schlegel published his _Language and Wisdom of the Hindus_, and urged the theory that India was the home of an ancestral race and a group of languages that were progenitors of various European ones. Other scholars subsequently favoured Zend, the language of Persia, and transferred the “racial beehive” to that country; rival claims were afterwards set up for Asia Minor and the Iranian plateau. The science of Comparative Philology was a direct product of these early controversies; it was established in the “thirties” when Bopp published his Comparative Grammar in which a new term, having a racial significance, was invented: he grouped all European languages, except Basque, Magyar, Turkish, and Finnish, as “Indo-Germanic”. After the study of Sanskrit literature revealed, however, that the Aryans occupied but a small part of India when their sacred hymns, the Vedas, were composed, the cradle of the Aryan race was shifted to some uncertain area beyond the Himalayan mountains. Max Müller, the distinguished Sanskrit authority, who in the words of an Indian scholar “devoted his lifetime to the elucidation of the learning, literature, and religion of ancient India”,[1] abandoned Bopp's patriotic term “Indo-Germanic” and adopted Aryan, which he founded on the Sanskrit racial designation “Arya”. At first he accepted the theory of an Aryan race and especially of an Aryan civilization which originated on the Central Asian plateau, but, as will be seen, he subsequently modified his views in this regard. [1] Romesh C. Dutt's _Ramáyana_ dedication. A new theory regarding the Aryans, who are now more commonly referred to as Indo-Europeans, was strongly advocated in 1851 and later by Dr. Robert Gordon Latham, who devoted many years to the study of ethnology and philology. He argued that as the major part of the peoples speaking Indo-European tongues was found in Europe, the cradle of the race might, after all, be transferred westward. This theory was supported by the fact (among others) that the Lithuanian language was no less archaic than Sanskrit.