THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF ECROPE. 461 



sands of the sea during a storm. The linguistic status of the 

 British Isles, above described, shows us one of these waves the 

 Keltic^which is, to put it somewhat flippantly, now upon its last 

 lap on the shores of the western ocean. 



We may discover how slippery speech is upon men's tongues 

 in yet another way namely, by observing it actually on the move 

 in a physically quiescent population, leaving a trail behind to 

 mark its passage. Language becomes truly sedentary when a dis- 

 tinctive name is given by men to a place of settlement ; it may be 

 a clearing in the virgin wilderness or a renaming of a village 

 after a clearing away by conquest of the former possessors. In 

 either case the result is the same. The name, be it Slavic, Keltic, 

 or other, tends to remain as a permanent witness that a people 

 speaking such a tongue once passed that way. A place name of 

 this kind may and often does outlive the spoken language in that 

 locality. It remains as a monument to mark the former confines 

 of the speech, since it can no more migrate than can the houses 

 and barns within the town. Of course, newcomers may adapt the 

 old name to the peculiar pronunciation of their own tongue, but 

 the savor of antiquity gives it a persistent power which is very 

 great. For this reason we find that after every migration of a 

 spoken language there follows a trail of such place names to indi- 

 cate a former condition. Our maps, both of the British Isles and 

 of Spain, show this phenomenon very clearly. In the one case the 

 Keltic speech has receded before the Teutonic influence, leaving 

 a belt of its peculiar village names behind. In the other the 

 Basque place names, far outside the present limits of the spoken 

 Basque, indicate no less clearly that the speech is on the move 

 toward the north, where no such intermediate zone exists. 



Then, after the village names have been replaced by the new- 

 comers, or else become so far mutilated as to lose their identity, 

 there still linger the names of rivers, mountains, bays, headlands, 

 and other natural features of the country. Hallowed by folklore 

 or superstition, their outlandish sounds only serve the more to in- 

 sure them against disturbance. All over England such names are 

 not uncommon, pointing to a remote past when the Keltic speech 

 was omnipresent. Nay, more, not only from all over the British 

 Isles, but from a large area of the mainland of Europe as well, 

 comes testimony of this kind to a former wide expansion of this 

 Keltic language. Such geographical names represent the third 

 and final stage of the erosion of language prior to its utter disap- 

 pearance. Nevertheless, as we shall show, the physical features 

 of men outlive even these, so inherent and deep rooted have they 

 become. It is indeed true, as Rhys, himself a linguist, has aptly 

 put it, that " skulls are harder than consonants, and races lurk 

 behind when languages slip away." 



