the latter; of all the existing tongues of the whole great family, the Lithuanian, on the Baltic, retains by far the most antique aspect; and, among the Germanic dialects, the speech of Iceland, the latest Germanic colony, is least varied from their common type. All that primitiveness of form, in respect both to language and institutions, which characterizes the Aryan branch of the family—and especially the Indian member of the branch, in its oldest period, represented to us in the Vedas—~would be fully and satisfactorily accounted for, without denying them a long history and wide migration, by attributing to them an exceptionally conservative disposition—such a disposition as so markedly distinguishes the Indian above the Persian people since their separation, making the former, in a vastly higher degree than the latter, the model and illustration of earliest Indo-European antiquity.
Nor, again, are the inter-connections of the different branches, so far as yet made out, of a nature to cast much light upon the history of their wanderings. That the separation of Indian and Persian is latest of all is, it is true, universally admitted. Nearly all agree, moreover, in allowing a like special relationship of the Greek and Latin, although its comparative remoteness, and the loss of intermediate forms, make the question one of decidedly greater doubt and difficulty. Beyond this, nothing is at present firmly established. The honour of a later and closer alliance with the Aryan or Indo-Persian branch has been confidently claimed for the classical or Greco-Latin, for the Slavonic, and for the Germanic, respectively. Within no long time past, a German scholar of high rank[1] has attempted to lay out a scheme of relationship for all the branches of the family. He assumes that the original stock parted first into a northern and a southern grand division: the northern included what afterward became the Germanic and the Slavo-Lithuanic branches, the latter of them dividing yet later into Slavonic and Lithuanic; the southern was broken up first into an Aryan and a southern European group, which respectively under-
- ↑ Professor August Schleicher, of Jena: his views may be found drawn out in full in the preface to his interesting work on the German language (Die Deutsche Sprache, Stuttgart, 1860).
