282 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Yol. ix. 



The ancient British traditions, preserved by Nennius, Geoffrej 

 of Monmouth, and others, agree in bringing the Celtic popula- 

 tion of the British Islands into Europe by way of Northern 

 Africa, and this, whatever the value of these traditions, was in 

 all probability the route by which the Sumerians journeyed west- 

 ward. But, together with these, or perhaps at an earlier period, 

 there passed into Western Europe that strangely isolated people, 

 the Basques. Their language, which contains many Celtic 

 words, is nevertheless not Celtic. The declension of its nouns is 

 virtually a use of postpositions ; its pronouns are postpositional ; 

 the verb follows its regimen, and the adjective follows the noun ^ 

 in all of which it agrees with the Accad. But it differs from 

 that language in placing the genitive before the nominative, in 

 which it agrees with the Khita proper and the general order of 

 Turanian grammar. There is virtually no such thing as a 

 Basque verb, if we except the forms niz, I am, duty I have, with 

 the remaining persons, which may be regarded as pronominal 

 affixes with verbal powers to transformed nouns or participles. 

 This is a development peculiar to the Basque as the most 

 isolated of Turanian languages. Yet the want of any true dis- 

 tinction between the verb and the noun is both Turanian and 

 American, and, taken together with the polysynthetic character 



