ON PROBLEMS IN INDO-GERMAN PHILOLOGY. 139 



secured in the scientific classification of the race to which we belong, and to 

 indicate the outlying difficulties which invite the united efforts of modern 

 genius and learning. 



Those who have fully studied the subject will readily admit that the great 

 majority of questions raised by the various writers on Indo-Germanic ethno- 

 graphy have received satisfactory answers, and that our general results rest 

 on the solid basis of scientific certainty. There are, in fact, only two pro- 

 blems suggested by this subject which still demand an adequate solution — 

 the amount and nature of the affinity which connects the Indo-Germanic and 

 Semitic branches of the human family, and the origin and interpretation of 

 the ancient Etruscan language. The difficulties occasioned by the Basque or 

 Euskarian language may be considered as having received at least an approx- 

 imate settlement, and it may be concluded generally that this isolated idiom 

 is due to a combination of the Celtic and Finnish elements, which form, either 

 separately or together, the outer fringe or hem of the population of Europe. 

 But the other two problems still require a scientific investigation. Indeed 

 it may be considered as the greatest reproach to modern scholarship that the 

 Etruscan language is little better known to us than it was to Dempster ; and 

 that while we can read the Cartouches of the Pharaohs, and interpret the 

 cuneiform records of Darius, we cannot come to any satisfactory result 

 respecting a language which was spoken by the immediate ancestors of 

 Maecenas, and which, long after the time of Pericles, was the vernacular 

 idiom of one of the most powerful and civilized of the nations of antiquity. 

 And with regard to the Semitic question, it is scarcely less strange that we 

 should still allow Rabbis and Talmudists to separate the language of the 

 Jews from that of the Greeks by a Chinese wall of demarcation, and that the 

 two adjacent sources, from which the streams of European civilization flowed 

 until they converged in one united channel of religious philosophy, should 

 still be referred to different hemispheres, and should be thought to present 

 indisputable marks of a diversity of origin. 



Having approached the discussion of these topics on various occasions, 

 and having surveyed them from different points of view, but always with a 

 tendency to the same result, I have thought that my best contribution to 

 this Meeting would be such a general statement of the conclusions at which 

 I have arrived as might tend to facilitate a mutual understanding between 

 myself and others who have not yet developed the direction of their researches 

 in the same field. For it appears to me to be one of the most important of 

 the objects of this Association to promote the intercourse of those who cul- 

 tivate science, and thus to substitute a systematic division of labour for that 

 purposeless repetition of the same exertions, which is the natural consequence 

 of unconnected inquiries. 



I have been led to include the two unsolved problems in Indo-Germanic 

 ethnography under one head, because I believe that one and the same channel 

 of investigation will conduct us to the proper issue in each case. The sci- 

 entific procedure, according to my view of the matter, will show that the 

 solution of both difficulties depends on a satisfactory definition of the Asiatic 

 starting-point and European limits of the Sclavonian emigration. And I 

 shall endeavour to show you that the first and last contacts of this great 

 family of men, — the extreme edges of this great stratum of population, — fur- 

 nish us with the points of transition to the Syro- Arabian stock in general, 

 and to the Etruscan nation in particular. 



But I must begin with some principles of universal application, which 

 appear to me to be the axioms or postulates in every ethnological argument, 

 but which, I fear, are not sufficiently regarded as such. As the sum of our 



