down, it becomes practically inevitable that conclusions about the bearers of them will be wrong. The indubitably sacral names of Franks, Alemanni, and Saxons have superseded a host of names of the period of the Varus battle — but if we did not happen to know this, we should long ago have been convinced that an expulsion or annihilation of old tribes by new intruders had taken place here. The names "Romans" and "Quirites," "Spartans" and "Lacedæmonians," "Carthaginian" and "Punic" have endured side by side — here again there was a risk of supposing two peoples instead of one. In what relation the names "Pelasgi," "Achæans," "Danai," stand to one another we shall never learn, and had we nothing more than these names, the scholar would long ago have assigned to each a separate people, complete with language and racial affinities. Has it not been attempted to draw from the regional designation "Doric" conclusions as to the course of the Dorian migration? How often may a people have adopted a land-name and taken it along with them? This is the case with the modern Prussians, but also with the modern Parsees, Jews, and Turks, while the opposite is the case in Burgundy and Normandy. The name "Hellenes" arose about 650, and, therefore, cannot be connected with any movement of population. Lorraine (Lothringen) received the name of a perfectly unimportant prince, and that, in connexion with the decision of a heritage and not a folk-migration. Paris called the Germans Allemands in 1814, Prussians in 1870, Boches in 1914 — in other circumstances three distinct peoples might have been supposed to be covered by these names. The West-European is called in the East a Frank, the Jew a Spaniole — the fact is readily explained by historical circumstances, but what would a philologist have produced from the words alone?
It is not to be imagined at what results the scholars of A.D. 3000 might arrive if they worked by present-day methods on names, linguistic remains, and the notion of original homes and migration. For example, the Teutonic Knights about 1300 drove out the heathen "Prussians," and in 1870 these people suddenly appear on their wanderings at the gates of Paris! The Romans, pressed by the Goths, emigrate from the Tiber to the lower Danube! Or a part of them perhaps settled in Poland, where Latin was spoken? Charlemagne on the Weser defeated the Saxons, who thereupon emigrated to the neighbourhood of Dresden, their places being taken by the Hanoverians, whose original settlement, according to the dynasty-name, was on the Thames! The historian who writes down the history of names instead of that of peoples, forgets that names, too, have their destinies. So also languages, which, with their migrations, modifications, victories, and defeats, are inconclusive even as to the existence of peoples associated with them. This is the basic error of Indo-Germanic research in particular. If in historic times the names "Pfalz" and "Calabria" have moved about, if Hebrew has been driven from Palestine to Warsaw, and Persian from the Tigris to India, what conclusions can be drawn
