The Arctic Home in the Vedas c2.5.3

c2.5.3

It is very hard, I know, to give up theories upon which one has worked all his life. But, as Mr. Andrew Lang has put it, it should always be borne in mind that “Our little systems have their day, or their hour : as knowledge advances they pass into the history of the efforts of pioneers.” Nor is the theory of the Arctic home so new and startling as it appears to be at the first sight. Several scientific men have already declared their belief that the original home of man must be sought for in the Arctic regions; and Dr. Warren, the President of the Boston University, has anticipated me, to a certain extent, in his learned and suggestive work, the *Paradise Found or the Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole*, the tenth edition of which was published in America in 1893. Even on strict philological grounds the theory of a primitive Aryan home in Central Asia has been now almost abandoned in favour of North Germany or Scandinavia; while Prof. Rhys, in his *Hibbert Lectures on Celtic Heathendom*, is led to suggest “some spot within the Arctic circle” on purely mythological considerations. I go only a step further, and show that the theory, so far as the primitive Aryan home is concerned, is fully borne out by Vedic and Avestic traditions, and, what is still more important, the latest geological researches not only corroborate the Avestic description of the destruction of the Aryan Paradise, but enable us to place its existence in times before the last Glacial epoch.