PREFACE TO THE SECOXP VOI.r.ME. 



■worthy of our attention, each of them expressive of some distinct 

 meaning. These will prove, what with many readers is a fact 

 ascertained upon other evidence, such as the contents of sepulchral 

 mounds, traditionary laws, and various parallel researches, that the 

 tribes which descended upon Britain had entered Europe, not as 

 a set of savages, or wandering pastoral tribes, or mere pii-ates and 

 warriors, but as colonists, who, rude as they may have been in 

 dress and manners, yet, in essential points, were already a civilized 

 people. It will be seen at the same time that they must have come 

 from a colder country ; for while these names comprehend the 

 Oak, Beech, Birch, Hawthorn, and Sloe trees, that extend far into 

 Northern Asia, they do not comprise the Elm, Chestnut, Maple, 

 "Walnut, Sycamore, Holly, or any evergreen, except of the Fir tribe, 

 or Plum, Pear, Peach, or Cherry, or any other fruit-tree except 

 the Apple. For all these latter they adopted Latin names, a proof 

 that at the time when they first came in contact with the Eoman 

 ^provincials on the Lower Ehine, they were not the settled in- 

 habitants of the country they were then occupying, but foreigners 

 newly arrived there as colonists or conquerors, from a country 

 where those trees were unknown. It is remarkable that the early 

 Greek writers make no mention of any German tribes, but represent 

 the Scythians as the next neighbours of the Celts, and this difference 

 in the names of one set of trees and the other, and the names which 

 they adopted being Eoman and not Celtic, suggests that the Germans 

 had come down from the north-east not long before the Christian 

 era, and intruded themselves, as a wedge between those two more 

 anciently recorded nations. 



" There seems to be much misapprehension in respect to this 

 great movement of the Eastern races which broke up the Eoman 

 empire. The subject is one into which it would here be out of 

 place to enter fully, and it has been largel}' treated by J. Grimm 

 in his admirable Goschichte dcr Deutschen Sprache. But even in 

 the following vocabulary we shall see evidence of the continuous 

 advance of a civilized race from the confines of India to these 

 islands, and nothing indicative of a great rush from the Nortli of 

 Avild hordes bent upon robbery and destruction, as it has been 



