544 MA N : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



followed different and extremely divergent lines of evolution 1 . 

 Yet both are brought at or about the same time from the same 

 area, the district west of the Vistula, which is impossible. 



The difficulty is intensified when we throw in the Keltic and 

 Italic groups, also assumed to have been specialised in the same 



region and about the same time. There is, to be 

 anTa^ 6 Factor. SLire ' tne Lithuanian factor, of which so much has 



been made, and which certainly cannot be over- 

 looked. But the archaic character of this language, which still 

 survives in two forms (Lithuanian proper and Lettic) in the Wilna 

 and neighbouring districts, is distinctly of a proto-Slavic type, and 

 has no particular bearing on the question at issue. It can prove 

 nothing except that, owing to local conditions, a very early form 

 of Slavonic speech has persisted in the region where one might 

 almost expect to find it. I cannot see that it throws much light 

 on Aryan and still less on Hellenic origins, but is rather connected 

 with Slav migrations, of which presently. 



It is evident from the national traditions that the proto-Greeks 

 did not arrive en bloc, but rather at intervals in separate and often 

 hostile bands bearing different names. But all these groups 

 Achaeans, Danai, Argians, Dolopes, Myrmidons, Leleges and 

 many others, some of which were also found in Asia Minor, but 

 not in the Baltic lands retained a strong sense of their common 

 origin. The sentiment, which may be called racial rather than 

 national, received ultimate expression when to all of them was 

 extended the collective name of Hellenes (Sellenes originally), 

 that is, descendants of Deucalion's son Hellen, whose two sons 

 zEolus and Dorus, and grandson Ion, were supposed to be the 

 progenitors of the ^Eolians, Dorians, and lonians. But such 

 traditions are merely reminiscences of times when the tribal 



1 For instance, the two phonetic systems differed toto ccelo, and while proto- 

 Teutonic had a well-developed scale of sound-shifting peculiar to itself, Hellenic 

 leaned on the contrary towards the Keltic P and Q with T superadded, as we 

 see in such variants as reacrapes, iriffvpts; TTUJS, KUS, etc., where all the initials (r, 

 TT, K) represent an organic q. But the shift in Greek was very irregular and 

 undeveloped, all the changes occurring even within the same dialect, as if not 

 so much by normal internal evolution, as by outward influences contact, for 

 instance, with proto- Gaels and proto-Kymry in Asia Minor or the Balkan 

 peninsula (see above). 



