Indo-European.--In a million years?--Bless my soul, in a poor
little hundred thousand!

The Aryan languages, since they began to be, have been spreading
out and retreating, mixing and changing and interchanging; one
imposed on another, hidden under another, and recrudescing
through another; through ten or a hundred thousand years,--or
however long it may be; just as they have been doing in
historical times. You find Persian half Arabicized; Armenian
come to be almost a dialect of Persian; Latin growing up through
English; Greek almost totally submerged under Latin, Slavonic,
and Turkish, and now with a tendency to grow back into Greek;
Celtic preserving in itself an older than Aryan syntax, and
conveying that in its turn to the English spoken by Celts.
Language is, to say the truth, a shifting kaleidoscopic thing: a
momentary aspect of racial expression. In a thousand years it
becomes unintelligible; we are modifying ours every day, upon
laws whose nature can be guessed. Yet ultimately all is a
symphony and ordered progression, with regular rhythms recurring;
it only seems a chaos, and unmusical, because we hear no more
than the fragment of a bar.

You all know the teaching of _The Secret Doctrine_ about the
Root-Races of Humanity, of which this present one, generally
called the Aryan, is the fifth; and how each is divided into
seven sub-races; each sub-race into seven family-races; and
each family-race into innumerable nations and tribes. According
to that work, this Fifth Root-Race has existed a million years.
The period of a sub-race is said to be about 210,000 years; and
that of a family-race, about 30,000. So then, four sub-races