Friedrich Max Müller

“ It is not infrequent to see many negro tribes experience, through expulsion from their home, the same fate which among us overtook the Jews and Armenians.
These migrations of the four aboriginal races of Africa were not voluntary, but were pursued under the pressure of external circumstances. It certainly was owing to the immigration en masse of the central races, and especially the Hamitic stock, that compelled the aborigines of Africa to recede before their mentally and bodily superior invaders, and withdraw to the south of the continent. ”

“ Among the Indian races, of whom only a few can be united linguistically in groups—as in respect to language the same heterogeneity prevails in America as among the negroes of Africa—still further migrations have been undertaken. These can easily be traced to their objective points. In North America such a point is the fruitful table-land of Mexico, toward which that stem, which in the north had attained among its kindred to a higher culture and greater strength, directed its victorious march. ”

“ The fate of the Jews is well known, at present scattered over the whole world as traders and bankers. The Phœnicians played the same rôle in antiquity as the Jews in modern times; we find them everywhere at that time, wherever the country was open to commerce. The Armenians, among the Indo-Europeans, may be compared with the Semitic Jews. The migrations of the Armenians, who like the Jews have no particular fatherland and in great measure live by traffic, are in no way behind those of the Jews ”

“ It is not needful that all the thirty-six pairs of costal cartilages should be cut through in order to lay the chest thoroughly open; and for sacrificial purposes it may have been inconvenient to cut through more than the thirty-four ribs which lie in front of it.
"If you are laying open a man's chest for a post-mortem examination, you go to work exactly as I am supposing the Aryan priest to do. You cut through the rib cartilages on each side and take them away, along with the breast-bone to which they are attached. ”

“ We find here many succeeding peoples of whom it is as yet not clearly shown whether they were fundamentally distinct, or in some particulars structurally related. The last of these invaders, the Aztecs, came from the north, and, as the language proves, are represented there to-day. According to the most recent investigations, the gigantic mounds which are found in North America are to be attributed to a people nearly related to the Aztecs of Mexico, and represent the rude precursors of the colossal structures of Central America. ”

“ Every thing becomes intelligible if we admit that, in cutting open the horse, two ribs were not to be cut, so that they might remain and keep the carcass together. In that case to mention the number of ribs that were to be cut had a purpose, though it is strange that tradition, which in India possesses such extraordinary tenacity in unimportant matters, should not have preserved the original purport of the words of Dirghatamas. I have looked in vain for a passage where the cutting of the thirty-four ribs in the horse-sacrifice is more fully described ”

“ Now, before the Egyptians, their relatives, the Berbers, with their collateral branch, the extinct Guanches, the Bedsha, the Somali, the Dankali, the Galla, and other tribes, wandered into Africa, and as ethnic movements are customarily slow and successional in nature, we may take one thousand years for the migration period. ”

“ This opinion is confirmed by the close relationship of the Fellah races with the central tribes, which appears to demonstrate an intermixture, as also by the many points of resemblance which the Fellah idioms offer to the Hamitic tongue.
That the individual peoples into which the negro race is divided have undertaken many migrations is at the very outset established by the great number of stocks, which are linguistically distinct, and of which only a few show any relationship with each other. ”

“ If I were a poet, and made a hymn about a post-mortem examination, I might speak of the operator's scalpel ‘cutting through the twenty ribs,’ without meaning to imply that the man of the period is devoid of his full complement. ”

“ That the Fellah races are not aboriginal in those regions which they at present occupy is proved by their distribution among the negro races. Such a stratification of two races can not be aboriginal, but indicates distinct migrations of each. According to our view, the Fellah originally settled north of the negroes, probably in the territory now possessed by the Berbers, and pressed from the northwest into the land occupied by them, whence they spread toward the east to Nubia. ”

“ The same Sylvius, in his answer to Vesalius, said that Galen was not wrong when he described man as having seven bones in his sternum, "for," said he, "in ancient times the robust chests of heroes might very well have had more bones than our degenerate day can boast." ”

“ If a 34-ribbed race of horses ever existed, I think it ought to turn up as a variety now and then. But it does not; and, what is still more to the purpose, we do not find that any of the immediate allies of the horse have fewer than thirty-six ribs; though they may, as in the case of the ass, have only five lumbar vertebræ. ”

“ But, in spite of this concentric diffusion, many nations maintained an intimate union, as the Italians and Greeks, the Iranians and Indians, the Slaves and the Germans, whereby many points of contact in the social habits of these peoples were instituted. ”

“ The members of this race are well known to be almost exclusively nomads, whose support is derived from the abundance of their herds and the fertility of their pastures. It would only need one bad year, or a plague among their flocks, to constrain these powerful hordes to invade the territory of their neighbors and expel them from their lands. These latter were compelled in a similar manner to press upon their neighbors, whereupon the various tribes were set in motion upon every side. ”

“ In the first place, from the very character of his country, through the absence of those animals and plants which contribute to enjoyment and prosperity, he had not raised himself to a knowledge of the pleasures of living incident to an advancing culture; and, in the second place, the country was itself large enough to contain the limited number of inhabitants, and to satisfy their simple wants. Whether the immediate neighbors of the Australian—the Papuans—have ever undertaken migrations is questionable ”

“ Africa shelters at present five races distinct from one another, viz., the Hottentot in the extreme south and southwest, the Caffre, spread northward from the Hottentot, as far as and beyond the equator, the negro races in the so-called Soudan, the Fellahs inclosed between the negroes and reaching from east to west in a straight line, and the central races spread from the north and northeast to the equator. ”

“ Although it is not improbable that the civilization of Mexico and Peru is at bottom congenital, as old elements of civilization could have been transported over the isthmus and on either side independently developed—in such a case the Muisca of Colombia might have formed the intermediate link—yet it is certain that the Mexicans and Peruvians were isolated, and as in the Old World with China and the rest of Asia, the one had no positive knowledge of the civilization of the other. ”

“ None of the known races has undertaken so extended a migration as the Malayan. The distribution of this race from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east, and from the Sandwich Islands in the north to New Zealand in the south, illustrates this. ”

“ In conjunction with these migrations of races, widely extended wanderings are apparent among the related divisions of the central or midland races, and especially of the Semites and Indo-Europeans, which wanderings are conjoined with the sad fate of the peoples concerned. ”

“ Neither will we consider migrations of individual races from some hypothetical ethnic center, nor those which many tribes have made that at present no longer exist. Except the aborigines of Australia, every people has undertaken migrations of greater or less extent, and many weighty reasons can be given to explain why the Australian has not ventured outside of his primitive abode. ”

“ As is known, the Indo-Europeans are subdivided into eight groups, viz., Indians, Iranians, Thracian-Illyrians—whose fragments may be identified with the modern Arnauts, Albanians, or Skipetars—Greeks, Italians, Celts, Slaves, and Germans ”

“ A people who have migrated widely are the notorious gypsies. According to their descent, the gypsies, who call themselves Roman, are Indian. They speak an idiom which finds a relative in the present dialect of India—the Enkelinnen of the noble Veda tongue. ”

“ As we have already considered the immigration of the Hamites into the north of Africa in reviewing the peoples of this continent, there only remain to be examined the Semitic and Indo-European stocks. ”

“ But, in order to do this, no one would go through the great trouble and labor of chopping through the bony parts of the ribs of a horse. Moreover, such a proceeding would be incompatible with the objection to mangling the horse's bones, which is strongly displayed elsewhere in the Vedic hymn.
"But every bony rib ends below in a gristly substance, and it is quite easy to cut these ‘costal cartilages,’ and then, turning them back, along with the breastbone, the cavity of the chest is laid widely open, and the priest readily reaches the heart or the like. ”

“ IN endeavoring to subject this question to a brief examination, it must be previously understood that we only refer to those migrations which explain the distribution of existing and contemporaneous races and peoples, and such as can be deduced with some certainty from acknowledged facts. ”

“ Other zoölogists, and more particularly M. Sanson, raised some strong objections, but M. Pictrement replied to them in his "Mémoire sur les Chevaux à trente-quatre côtes des Aryas de l'Époque Védique" (Paris, 1871) , and the question is still sub judice. ”

“ The neck consists of fifteen bones, a collar-bone on each side, and the chin; two at its root, and the same on the forehead, the eyes, and the cheeks, and the nose of firm bone. The ribs with their supports and the Arbudas (Zippenknorpel) are seventy-two. Two front-bones, four skull-bones of the head, seventeen bones of the chest, these are the bones of a man. ”