v BRITISH ETHNOLOGY. 207 



language. In Britain, on the contrary, the Teu- 

 tonic dialects have overpowered the pre-existing 

 forms of speech, and the people are vastly less 

 " Teutonic " than their language. Whatever may 

 have been the extent to which the Celtic-speaking 

 population of the eastern half of Britain was trod- 

 den out and supplanted by the Teutonic-speaking 

 Saxons and Danes, it is quite certain that no con- 

 siderable displacement of the Celtic-speaking peo- 

 ple occurred in Cornwall, Wales, or the Highlands 

 of Scotland; and that nothing approaching to the 

 extinction of that people took place in Devonshire, 

 Somerset, or the western moiety of Britain gen- 

 erally. Nevertheless, the fundamentally Teutonic 

 English language is now spoken throughout Brit- 

 ain, except by an insignificant fraction of the popu- 

 lation in Wales and the Western Highlands. But 

 it is obvious that this fact affords not the slightest 

 justification for the common practice of speaking 

 of the present inhabitants of Britain as an " Anglo- 

 Saxon " race. It is, in fact, just as absurd as the 

 habit of talking of the French people as a " Latin " 

 race, because they speak a language which is, in 

 the main, derived from Latin. And the absurdity 

 becomes the more patent when those who have no 

 hesitation in calling a Devonshire man, or a Cor- 

 nish man, an " Anglo-Saxon," would think it ridic- 

 ulous to call a Tipperary man by the same title, 

 though he and his forefathers may have spoken 

 English for as long a time as the Cornish man. 



