The mutual relationship of the Arian, Greek, Italian, Letto-Sclavonian, Germanic, and Celtic languages proves the relationship of the nations who have spoken and still speak them; it proves that all these nations have a common origin and descent. The words, of which the roots in these languages exhibit complete phonetic agreement, must be considered as a common possession, acquired before the separation; and from this we can discover at what stage of life the nation from which these languages derive their origin stood at the time when it was not yet divided into these six great branches, and separated into the nations which subsequently occupied abodes so extensive and remote from each other. We find common terms for members of the family, for house, yard, garden, and citadel; common words for horses, cattle, dogs, swine, sheep, goats, mice, geese, ducks; common roots for wool, hemp or flax, corn (_i.e._ wheat, spelt, or barley), for ploughing, grinding, and weaving, for certain metals (copper or iron), for some weapons and tools, for waggon, boat and rudder, for the elementary numbers, and the division of the year according to the moon.[1] Hence the stock, whose branches and shoots have spread over the whole continent of Europe and Asia from Ceylon to Britain and Scandinavia, cannot, even before the separation, have been without a certain degree of civilisation. On the contrary, this common fund of words proves that even in that early time it tilled the field, and reared cattle; that it could build waggons and boats, and forge weapons, and if the general name for the gods and some names of special deities are the same in widely remote branches of this stock,--in India, Iran, Greece, and Italy, and even on the plains of Lithuania,--it follows that the notions which lie at the base of these names must also be counted among the common possessions existing before the separation. We can hardly venture a conjecture as to the region in which the fathers of the Indo-European nations attained to this degree of cultivation. It must have been of such a nature as to admit of agriculture beside the breeding of cattle. The varieties of produce mentioned and the domestic animals point to a northern district, which, however, cannot have reached down to the ocean, inasmuch as no common roots are in existence to denote the sea. This proof is strengthened by the fact that in all the branches the wolf and bear alone among beasts of prey are designated by common roots. If we combine these considerations with the equal extension of the tribes of this nation towards east and west, we may assume that an elevated district in the middle of the eastern continent was the abode of the nation while yet undivided.