ZOOLOGICAL LAWS 511 



which the Ayran tense system is found in its greatest delicacy and 

 perfection. But we know that in all cases where an Aryan language 

 has without doubt been adopted by a non-Aryan folk the tense system is 

 invariably broken up. No better example than this is needed than 

 ordinary " pigeon " English. So difficult is it for the defenders of the 

 non- Aryan theory of the origin of the aborigines of Greece to maintain 

 their position that one of the latest, Professor Burrows, has to rely on 

 certain supposed syntactical survivals of a non-Aryan language which 

 Sir John Rhys believes that he has found in Welsh and Irish, and in 

 the remarkable resemblance which Professor Morris Jones thinks that 

 he has traced between the syntax of those languages and that of Berber 

 and ancient Egyptian. 



Yet when we examine the evidence on which Sir John Rhys relies, 

 it turns out to be only three Welsh and Cornish oghams, written not in 

 pure Celtic, but in dog Latin, and also two Irish oghams, which show 

 a looseness in the use of the genitive suffix at a time when final syllables 

 were dropping out of use in Irish. Sir John Rhys supposes that the 

 non-Aryan inhabitants of these islands derived their Gaelic speech from 

 a people whom he terms Ceiticans, who spoke Goidelic, and who were 

 followed by the Brythons, who found the aborigines already Celticized. 

 Professor Morris Jones freely admits that the aborigines must have 

 borrowed the full Aryan tense system, a fact in itself sufficient, from 

 what I have already said, to arouse grave suspicions as to the validity 

 of any arguments based on supposed fundamental grammatical differ- 

 ences. But this supposed taking over of the full Aryan tense system 

 by the non-Aryan aborigines of these islands is rendered all the more 

 miraculous from the circumstance that Sir John Rhys holds that his 

 Ceiticans, who spoke Goidelic, " came over not later than the great 

 movements which took place in the Celtic world of the continent in the 

 sixth and fifth centuries before our era," that the Brythons " came over 

 to Britain between the time of Pytheas and that of Julius Caesar," and 

 that the Brythons were not likely to come into contact on any large scale 

 with the aborigines " before they had been to a considerable extent 

 Celticized." It is thus assumed that it was possible for the aborigines 

 to have been so completely Celticized as to have adopted the Aryan 

 tense system, as well as the Aryan vocabulary, in its fullness in the 

 interval between the sixth or fifth century and the second century B.C. 

 Yet English has been the master speech in Britain for many centuries, 

 and that, too, when reading and writing have been commonly practised ; 

 yet Gaelic still survives, whilst Welsh not only survives but flourishes. 

 It is, therefore, simply incredible that such a complete transformation 

 as that postulated could have taken place in three or four centuries in an 

 age when writing and literature can be hardly said to have existed in 

 these islands. 



