as English and German, there is no à priori ground for believing that they may not come to differ as much as English and Polish, or Greek, or Hindustani. And, by approved scientific methods of linguistic research, students of language have traced out the boundaries of a grand family of human speech, embracing, along with the Germanic and Romanic groups, nearly all the other tongues of Europe, and those of no small portion of south-western Asia. We will accordingly go on first to pass in review the various branches claimed to constitute this family, and then to examine the evidence upon which the claim is founded.
Of nearest kindred with the Latin, as well as most nearly associated with it in history, is the ancient Greek, its classic compeer, but its superior in flexibility and beauty; superior, too, as regards the genius and culture of those to whom it served as the instrument of thought; but of far less conspicuous career, and making at the present day but an insignificant figure in the sum of human speech, being spoken only by the scanty population of Greece itself, and by the peoples, partly of Greek origin, which fill the islands and line the shores of the Ægean and Black seas.
The languages displaced by the Latin were, as we have seen, in great part Celtic. At the beginning of the historic period, the domain of the Celts included no mean portion of the soil of Europe. Britain, Gaul, a part of Spain, and the north of Italy, together with some of the provinces of central Europe, were in their possession. But the more energetic and persistent Italic and Germanic races soon began to gain ground upon them: and now, for a long succession of centuries, no Celtic tribe of any importance has maintained its integrity and independence. The Erse, or Gaelic of the Scotch Highlands, the native Irish, or Gaelic of Ireland, and the insignificant dialect of the Isle of Man, representing together the Gadhelic division of Celtic speech—and the Welsh in Wales, and the Breton or Armorican in Brittany, representatives of the other, the Cymric division, are the scanty remains of that great family of related tongues which, but little more than two thousand years ago, occupied
