As the instincts and capacities of the Aryan race have always been unique, it may prove instructive to glance at those features of its prehistoric existence in Asia which have been brought to light through comparative philology and mythology. In the first place, these sciences establish the fact that we of the West (Greeks, Italians, Germans, English) and the Hindoos of the East are of common origin. Our ancestors listened to the same legends, ballads, and mythical tales while gathered as children about one and the same mother, and they have handed them down to this generation of the descendants of each so little changed as to furnish ample proof of family relationship. Many of the more important words of the various Aryan languages are suggestively similar, and this in spite of the five thousand years of transmission, and of the diverse conditions incident to the growth of widely separated clans into great nations. The Aryans were worshippers of Nature in her more spectacular and heroic forms and moods,--in storms, fire, sunset, and dawn, but looked upward for their Supreme Deity. The sky, with its fathomless depths of blue and its star mysteries, was their Zeus. From this it will be seen that they were, in a way, idolaters, but their idolatry was not degrading; it was, indeed, ennobling. They contemplated Nature, and in her processes saw the hand of an all-pervading, beneficent power,--a God. They worshipped the God thus, and in no other way, revealed to them through His works. Their conceptions of family and community organization have served, and still serve, as models to civilized nations. They were paternal, the clans being large families with patriarchal heads, and elected councillors. They were pastoral, cultivating the soil and herding cattle, sheep, horses, and pigs; but they were at the same time good warriors. They wore leathern shoes, garments woven from wool, and they had at least a rudimentary knowledge of the sciences. From all this I infer that the early Aryans were a race of freemen, not subject to the class discrimination that ruined Egypt. Their appreciation of nature, and their reverence, ambition, and pertinacity fitted them to become the especial guardians of the arts, and their comparative class equality enabled them to fulfil the requirements of my theory that music can only flourish in a widely diffused interest and knowledge. It must breathe a genial and suggestive atmosphere.