When the connection between these languages was first realised, it was felt that all the tongues had been derived from a primitive mother speech, and that this primitive speech must have been spoken originally by a small group of people, the primitive Aryans, or, as we shall call them, the Wiros. But owing to loose thinking all the people who speak these languages to-day, as well as those who have spoken them in the past, were considered Aryans, and it was assumed that because their languages were related they were racially identical. As long as this applied only to European peoples no one raised any protest, but when Max-Müller asserted that the same blood runs in the veins of English soldiers as in the veins of the darkest Bengalese,[428] the Nordic spirit in this country, which, as we have seen, is prone to race exclusiveness, rose in its wrath, and the whole generalisation was questioned. It was then shown that languages could be imposed by conquerors upon their subjects, and that there were instances on record of the reverse process taking place, as in the case of the Frankish invaders of Gaul and the Viking settlers in Normandy. People then, with equal lack of lucid thinking, ran to the opposite extreme and said, “there is now no Aryan race, and there never has been one.” To Penka[429] is due the credit of making the matter clear. He pointed out that Aryan blood is not co-extensive with Aryan speech. He showed that those who use the latter are of several distinct anthropological types, but he argued that the primitive Aryans or Wiros must have been of one type. Penka’s contention seems eminently reasonable and, one would think, incontrovertible, for a group of languages, so closely resembling one another, must have grown up in a somewhat restricted area, among a people who had, during the formative period of the language, little intercourse with the outside world. The very conditions which would produce a specialised type of language, would, we may feel sure, have produced an equally specialised type of men, that is to say, a race in the anthropological meaning of the term. The failure of Penka’s views to carry widespread conviction was, I am inclined to think, due to the fact that his theory involved the identification of the primitive Wiros with the Nordic race. There is really no valid objection to this view, and, as will be seen later, the evidence which I am adducing points to a similar conclusion. But, unfortunately, this theory became associated with certain political opinions, and so became distasteful to those with a different outlook.