to other Branches of Knowledge. 327 



cient Germany, Sarmatia, Italy, Greece, Persia, Media, India, 

 were then inhabited by independent races of people, speaking 

 different languages, but languages strikingly analogous and 

 palpably allied to each other. The question which now oc- 

 curs' to be solved, is, whether these circumstances prove the 

 nations themselves to have descended from a common origin, 

 or admit of any other explanation \ Foreign conquests have 

 often introduced new languages among nations ; but it is 

 hard to conceive any such hypothesis applicable to the facts 

 now under consideration. If we suppose an Asiatic tribe, 

 speaking any one idiom belonging to this dynasty of lan- 

 guages, to have made conquests ever so extensive in Europe, 

 without leaving any traces in history, which is next to im- 

 possible, we could not imagine that they would introduce the 

 German language among the German race, and the Slavonic 

 among the widely-spread natives of Sarmatia, Ihe Greek 

 among the Greeks, the old Italic among the ancient nations 

 of Italy. Any person who considers the nature of that deeply- 

 rooted affinity which exists between these languages, will 

 find convincing proof that their analogies are not engrafted, 

 but spring out of their very fundamental structure. If we 

 take into account the immense extent of the countries over 

 which these nations were spread from so early a period, we 

 cannot refer their affinity of speech to any circumstances ac- 

 cidental and necessarily of restricted and merely local in- 

 fluence. It must have been the result of a gi^adual devia- 

 tion of one common language into a multitude of diverging 

 dialects ; and the conclusion that is forced upon us, when 

 we take all the conditions of the problem into consideration, 

 is, that the nations themselves descended from one orisrinal 

 people, and, consequently, that the varieties of complexion, 

 and other physical characters discovered among them, are the 

 effects of variation from an originally common type. 



Besides the languages which I have enumerated as the 

 principal members of the Indo-European family, other groups 

 have been more lately admitted, and some of them appear to 

 be more remotely allied to that stock. One of these is the 

 Celtic language, which was at one time asserted to be en- 

 tirely distinct, and of separate origin from the Indo-Euro- 



