46o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



who knows nothing of a Keltic speech at all. The Welshman in 

 turn is physically allied to the Irish and distinct from many of 

 the Gaelic-speaking Scotch, although these last two speak even 

 the same subtype of the Keltic language. Such racial affinity 

 as obtains between certain of these people is in utter defiance of 

 the bonds of speech. The Breton should be more at home among 

 his own folk in the high Alps in respect of race, even although 

 he could hold no converse with the Swiss people in their own 

 tongue. 



If these examples be not enough, turn to other parts of 

 Europe. The Walloons and the Flemish, component parts of the 

 Belgian nation, are indeed quite distinct in race and in language 

 alike.* It is only an accident. For if we turn to Switzerland, 

 seeking for physical differences along the boundary of the 

 French- and German-speaking cantons, they are not to be found, f 

 In northern Italy to-day there are considerable communities still 

 bearing the German speech and customs, evidence of the Teu- 

 tonic invasions of historic times. These people have become so 

 completely absorbed that they are not distinguishable physically 

 from their Italian neighbors. There are indeed spots in Italy 

 where German racial traits survive, but they are quite remote 

 from these islets of Teutonic language. J 



Nor in eastern Europe is the picture less confusing. The Bul- 

 garian language, spoken by people so outlandish to Europeans 

 that they gave the word " bogie " to our nurses wherewith to 

 frighten children, went first. Now it is the Roumanian speech 

 which, in its turn, is disappearing before the Slavic tongue.* 

 Magyar, the language of the Hungarians, spreading toward the 

 east, displaced by German, which is forcing its way in from the 

 northwest, is also on the move. Beneath all this hurry-skurry of 

 speech the racial lines remain as fixed as ever. Language, in 

 short, as a great philologist has put it, " is not a test of race. It 

 is a test of social contact." Waves of language have swept over 

 Europe, leaving its racial foundations as undisturbed as are the 



* Annales de Demographie, iv, p. 224 ; or more fully, with maps by the author, in 

 Publications of the American Statistical Association, v, p. 28. 



f The French and German portions of Switzerland are shown in Forschungen zur 

 Deutschen Landes- und Volkskunde, viii, No. 5, 1894; and Rundschau fiir Geographic 

 und Statistik, xiii, p. 337, appendix map. 



:{; Map in Petermann's Geographische Mittheilungen, 18'7'7, plate 17; w'rfe also Globus, 

 Ixvi, p. 165 ; and Journal of the Anthropological Institute, ii, p. 108. 



* Revue de Geographic, xxxvii, p. 321. Perhaps the best compilation of references to 

 ethnological maps extant, bringing them down to 1885, is given by Dr. Andree in Mittheil- 

 ungen des Vereins fiir Erdkunde zu Leipzig, 1885, pp. 173 seq. ; less fully to 1879 in Archiv 

 fiir Anthropologic, xi, p. 454. The editor confesses that nearly all of them are indeed not 

 ethnological, but merely " speech " maps. 



