METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 217 



by a French colony, who, by the very effect of the sub- 

 ordination involved in slavery lost their own diverse lan- 

 guages and adopted that of their masters, would vanish. 

 And metaphysical philosophers, observing the identity of 

 Haytian French with that spoken on the shores of the 

 Seine and the Loire, would argue that the men of St. 

 Domingo with woolly heads, black and oily skins, small 

 calves, and slightly bent knees, are of the same race, de- 

 scended from the same parental stock, as the Frenchmen 

 with silky brown, chestnut, or fair hair, and white skins. 

 For they would say, their languages are more similar than 

 French is to German or Spanish." * 



It must not be imagined that the case put by 

 Desmoulins is a merely hypothetical one. Events 

 precisely similar to the transport of a body of 

 Africans to the West India Islands, indeed, cannot 

 have happened among uncivilised races, but 

 similar results have followed the importation of 

 bodies of conquerors among an enslaved people over 

 and over again. There is hardly a country in Eu- 

 rope in which two or more nations speaking widely 

 different tongues have not become intermixed; and 

 there is hardly a language of Europe of which we 

 have any right to think that its structure affords a 

 just indication of the amount of that intermixture. 



As Dr. Latham has well said: — 



" It is certain that the language of England is of An- 

 glo-Saxon origin, and that the remains of the original 

 Keltic are unimportant. It is by no means so certain that 

 the blood of Englishmen is equally Germanic. A vast 



* Desmoulins, Eistoire Naturellc ties Races Humaines, 

 p. 345, 1826. 



