Before the coming of the Aryan, the Rhine flowed as now; the Alps pierced the sky with their glistening peaks as they do to-day; the Danube, the Rhône, hurried on, as now, toward the sea. Was it all a beautiful, unpeopled solitude waiting in silence for the richly endowed Asiatic to come and possess it? Far from it. It was teeming with humanity--if, indeed, we may call such the race which modern research and discovery has revealed to us. It is only within the last thirty years that anything whatever has been known of prehistoric man; but now we are able to reconstruct him with probable accuracy. A creature, bestial in appearance and in life; dwelling in caves, which, however, a dawning sense of a higher humanity led him to decorate with carvings of birds and fishes; but, certain it is, the brain which inhabited that skull was incapable of performing the mental processes necessary to the simplest form of civilization; and life must have been to him simply a thing of fierce appetites and brutal instincts. Such was the being encountered by the Aryan, when he penetrated the mysterious land beyond the confines of Greece and Italy. The extermination, and perhaps, to some extent, assimilation, of this terrible race must have required centuries of brutalizing conflict, and, it is easy to imagine, would have produced just such men as were the northern barbarians, who for five hundred years terrorized Europe: men insensible to fear, terrible, fierce, but with fine instincts for civilization--dormant Aryan germs, which quickly developed when brought into contact with a superior race. The earliest Indo-European migration is supposed to have been into Greece and Italy, where was laid the basis for the civilization of the world. The second was probably into Western Europe and the British Isles; then, after many centuries, the central, and last, and at a time comparatively recent, into the Eastern portion of the continent. So by the fourth century B.C. three great divisions of the Aryan race occupied Europe north of Greece and Italy. The Keltic, the western; the Teutonic, the central; the Slavonic, the eastern; and these, in turn, had ramified into new subdivisions or tribes. To state it, as in the pedigree of the individual, the Aryan was the founder, the father of the family; Slav, Teuton, and Kelt the three sons. Gaul and Briton were sons of the Kelt; Saxon, Angle, Helvetian, etc., sons of the Teuton; and all alike grandchildren of the Aryan; whom--to carry the illustration farther--we may imagine to have had older children, who long ago had left the paternal home and settled about the Caspian and Mediterranean Seas. Mede, Persian, Greek, Roman, apparently bearing few marks of kinship to these uncouth younger brothers whom we have found in Europe in this fourth century B.C., but with nevertheless the same cradle, and the same ancestral roots.