Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IIL THE SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS. The home of the Indo-Germanic stock lay in the west- Jndo-ier- ern Portin f central Asia; from this it spread manic mi- partly in a south-eastern direction over India, gratioua., . T-i i partly in a north-western over Jiurope. It is difficult to determine the primitive seat of the Indo-Ger- Idbiis more precisely: it must, however, at any rate have been inland and remote from the sea, as there is no name for the sea common to the Asiatic and European branches. Many indications point more particularly to the regions of the Euphrates; so that, singularly enough, the primitive seats of the two most important civilized stocks, ?the Indo- Germanic and the Aramaean, ?almost coincide as regards locality. This circumstance gives support to the hypothesis that these races also were originally connected, although, if there was such a connection, it certainly must have been anterior to all traceable development of culture imd language. We cannot define more exactly their original locality, nor are we able to accompany the individual stocks in the course of their migrations. The European branch probably lingered in Persia and Armenia for some considerable time after the departure of the Indians; for, according to all appearance, that region has been the cradle of agriculture and of the culture of the vine. Barley, spelt, and wheat are indigenous in Mesopotamia, and tho vine to the south of the Caucasus and of the Caspian Sea: there too the plum, the walnut, and others of the more easily transplanted fruit trees are native. It is worthy of notice that the name for the sea is common to most of the European stocks?Latins, Celts, Germans, and Slavonians;they must probably therefore before, their separatum have reached the coast of the Black...