many an antique form, giving valuable hints respecting the grammatical and phonetic development of the language. Their evidence is supplemented in a very important manner by that of other kindred Italian dialects. The Oscan or Opican of southern Italy was the language of the Samnites and their allies, from whose hands Rome wrung after a severe and often doubtful struggle the dominion of the peninsula: it was not disused as the official speech of some of the southern provinces until less than a hundred years before Christ; and coins and inscriptions dating from the two or three preceding centuries still teach us something of its structure and character. The Umbrian, the tongue of north-eastern Italy, is yet more fully represented to us by the Euguvine tablets, inscribed with the prayers and ceremonial rules of a fraternity of priests, and supposed to be as old as the third and fourth centuries before our era. Of the Volscian dialect, also, and the Sabine or Sabellian—the former being more akin with the Umbrian, the latter with the Latin—some exceedingly scanty relics have been discovered. The interpretation and comprehension of all these—resting, as it does, solely upon comparison with the Latin and other more distantly related tongues—is at present, and is likely always to remain, incomplete and doubtful; but they are of essential importance, both in explaining some of the peculiarities of the Latin, and in fixing its position as one of a group of kindred dialects occupying the greater portion of the Italian peninsula, and hence most suitably to be denominated the Italic group. The theory that the Latin was produced by a mixture of somewhat discordant elements—of Roman, Sabine, and Oscan; or of these and Etruscan—brought together by historical circumstances, and finally fused into homogeneousness, is one which belonged to a former stage of linguistic science, and is now rejected as uncalled-for and groundless. Yet more untenable, and wanting even a semblance of foundation, is the derivation of Latin from Greek, a favourite dogma of times not long past, but at present abandoned by every comparative philologist whose opinion is of the slightest value.
In the Greek language, we reach an antiquity in the
