Note 302 — Chapter IV

It was one of the first efforts of the science of language to endeavour to trace out the original home of the so-called Aryas and their subsequent migrations. "Emigration," said Bunsen, "is the great agent in forming nations and languages" (Philosophy of Hist., i. 56); and Niebuhr, who has traced out most of the migrations of the Greek tribes, observes that "this migration of nations was formerly not mentioned anywhere" (Anc. Hist., ii. 212). Quite recently, Professor Flinders Petrie has worked at the question of European migrations in the Huxley lecture of 1907 (Journ. Anthrop. Inst., xxxvi. 189-232), his valuable maps showing "the movements of twenty of the principal peoples that entered Europe during the centuries of great movements that are best known to us" (204). In the meantime, the folklorist has much to do in this direction, and up to the present he has almost entirely ignored or misread the evidence. I do not know whether Mr. Nutt would still adhere to his conclusion that the myth embodied in the Celtic expulsion-and-return formula is undoubtedly solar (Folklore Record, iv. 42), but a restatement of Mr. Nutt's careful and elaborate analysis would lead me to trace the myth to the migration period of Aryan history, just as I agree with von Ihering that the ver sacrum of the Romans is a rite continued from the migration period to express in religious formulæ, and on emergency to again carry out, the ancient practice of sending forth from an overstocked centre sufficient of the tribesmen and tribeswomen to leave those who remained economically well-conditioned (The Evolution of the Aryan, 249-290). Pheidon's law at Corinth, alluded to by Aristotle (Pol., ii. cap. vi.), could only be carried out by a sending out of the surplus. See also Aristotle, Pol., ii. cap. xii.; and Newman's note to the first reference, quoting similar laws elsewhere. Both the "junior-right" traditions and customs take us back to the same conditions. The occupation of fresh territories is an observable feature of the Russian mir (Wallace, Russia, i. 255; Laveleye Primitive Property, 34), and Mr. Chadwick has recently called attention to the corresponding Scandinavian evidence (Origin of the English Nation, 334).