In the early days of the hypothesis students noted that Sanskrit was the most archaic of the languages, and forgetting that the Vedic hymns were composed 1000 or 1500 /B.C./, while the earliest Greek literature dated from 800 or 900 /B.C./, there was a tendency to derive the whole group from North India.[434] Subsequently, when the close connection between Sanskrit and Zend, the ancient Persian tongue, was recognised, and it was realised that the Vedic folk were recent arrivals in the Punjab when the Vedic hymns were being composed, the Aryan cradle was removed to the region watered by the Oxus and the Jaxartes, and the slopes of the Hindu Kush.[435] Here the cradle remained for a long time. Pott, hypnotised by his aphorism _ex oriente lux_, drew a wonderful picture of the westward advance of the Wiros from their eastern home. Others filled in, largely from their own imaginations, the remaining details. And so we get the mid-nineteenth century view of these Aryan super-men, with a language containing potentialities of all that is fine in literature, with a social organisation and morality which was to reform benighted Europe, worshipping deities which were the products either of solar or chthonic myths or of diseases of language, setting forth from the western slopes of the Himalayan _massif_, urged on “by an irresistible impulse” towards the setting sun, migrating westward and ever westward, carrying their wives and families in the famous Aryan cart provided for them by a distinguished anthropologist.[436] Such was the view unanimously held by all Europe, and which figures still in too many text-books. One man only was left crying in the wilderness, or at least in the steppe, and he was an Englishman. As Hehn[437] wrote in 1874, “so it came to pass that in England, the native land of fads, there chanced to enter into the head of an eccentric individual the notion of placing the cradle of the Aryan race in Europe.” Those of us who live “in that land of fads” may well be proud of Dr. Latham, who advanced these views in 1851, and subsequently enlarged upon them.[438] In due course nearly all other philologists followed suit, and Max-Müller alone was unrepentent, and as late as 1887 wrote “I should still say, as I said forty years ago, ‘Somewhere in Asia,’ and no more.”[439] But by then the Asiatic cradle had gone to the limbo of exploded hypotheses.