away from their native homes, or, like the Irish, have lived long under a foreign yoke, or, like the Celts of ancient Gaul and Spain, have received laws, civilization, and religion from another and a superior race. Languages unnumbered and innumerable have disappeared from off the face of the earth since the beginning of human history; but only in part by reason of the utter annihilation of the individuals who had spoken them; more often, doubtless, by their dispersion, and incorporation with other communities, of other speech. Everywhere, too, where the confines of different forms of speech meet, there goes on more or less of mixture between them, or of effacement of the one by the other. Yet, on the other hand, mixture of language is not necessary proof of mixture of race. We can trace the genesis of a very large part of our own vocabulary to the banks of the Tiber, but hardly the faintest appreciable portion of our ancestry is Roman. We obtained our Latin words in the most strangely roundabout way: they were brought us by certain Germanic adventurers, the Normans, who had learned them from a mixed people, the French, chiefly of Celtic blood; and these again, had derived them from another heterogeneous compound of Italican races, among whom the Latin tribe was numerically but a feeble element.
Of such nature are the difficulties in the way of our inferring the race-connections of an individual or of a community with certainty from the relations of the language which either speaks. They are of undeniable force and importance and must be borne constantly in mind by every one who is pursuing investigations, and laying down conclusions, in linguistic ethnology. They drive him to seek after some other concurrent test of descent, which shall serve to check and control his own results; and they make him court and welcome the aid of the physicist, as well as of the archæologist and the historian.
But, notwithstanding this, their consequence, and their power to invalidate linguistic evidence, must not be overrated. They concern, after all, what in the grand sum of human history are the exceptions to a general rule. It still remains true that, upon the whole, language is a tolerably
