evolution was chiefly interested.

Which last phrase in itself is rank heresy, and smacks of the
'white man's burden,' and all such nonsense as that. We might
learn a lesson here. Think: since that time, during how many
thousands of years, off and on, has not that old sub-race been
the darling of evolution, the seat of the Crest-Wave, and place
where all things were doing? All the Setis, the grand Rameseses
and Thothmeses came since then; all the historic might and glory
of Egypt. You never know rightly when to say that the life of a
sub-race is ended; the two-hundred-and-ten-century period
cannot, I imagine, include it from birth to death; but can only
mark the time between the rise of one, and the rise of another.--
But now to India.

We have no knowledge of the last time when Sanskrit was spoken:
it has always been, in historic or quasi-historic ages, what it
is now--literary language preserved by the high castes. In the
days of the Buddha it had long given place to various vernaculars
grown out of it: Pali, and what are called the Prakrits.--We
have lost memory of what I may call the archetypal languages of
Europe: the common ancestor of the Celtic group, for instance;
or that Italian from which Latin and the lost Oscan and Savellian
and the rest sprang. No matter; they remain in the ideal world,
and I doubt not in the course of our cyclic evolution we shall
return to them, take them up, and pass through them again. But
it seems to me that in the land of Esoteric History, where Manu
provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war, the
archetypal language of the whole sub-race has been preserved.
The Aryans went down into India, and there, at the extreme end of