On account of the peculiar position of the blond type, it has been pre-eminently identified with the so-called Aryan race. As is well known, most of the languages of Europe are derived from one ancient form of speech,--the parental Aryan language. Slavic, Teutonic, and Romance languages are the most important modern divisions of this group in Europe, to which Greek, Celtic, Lithuanian, and Albanian also belong. Among European languages, only Finnish and its relatives on the Baltic, Magyar, Turkish, and Basque, do not belong to this extended group. Aryan languages are spoken by people of the most diverse racial types; nevertheless there are scientists who try to identify the blond north-European with the ancient pure Aryan, and who claim for the race pre-eminent hereditary gifts, because the people who at present and in our concept are the leaders of the world speak Aryan languages. Scientific proof of these contentions cannot be given. They are rather fancies of north-European dreamers, based on the complaisant love of the achievements of the blondes. No one has ever proved either that all the Aryans of the earliest times were blondes, or that people speaking other languages may not have been blond, too; and nobody would be able to show that the great achievements of mankind were due to blond thinkers. On the contrary, the men to whom we are indebted for the basic advance of civilization belong to the dark-complexioned human types of the Orient, Greece, and Italy, and not to our blond ancestors. How deep and emotional a hold this idea has in the minds of some scientists appears when some investigators try to show us that Christ cannot have been a Jew by descent, but must have been an Aryan. THE GREAT BLOND ARYAN--A FICTION The idea of the great blond Aryan, the leader of mankind, is the result of self-admiration, that emotional thinkers have tried to sustain by imaginative reasoning. It has no foundation in observed fact. This, however, does not decrease the emotional value of the fiction that has taken hold of minds wherever the Teutonic, German, or Anglo-Saxon type--however it may be called--prevails.