Xli INTRODUCTION. 



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, 

 Chesnut, Maple, Walnut, Sycamore, Holly, or any ever- 

 green, 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 into contact with the Roman 

 provincials on the Lower Rhine, they were not the settled 

 inhabitants 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 the one set of trees and the other, and the names 

 which they adopted being Roman, and not Celtic, suggests 

 that the Germans had come down from the north-east not 

 very long before the Christian era, and intruded them- 

 selves, 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 Roman empire. The subject is one, into which it 

 would here be out of place to enter fully, and it has been 

 largely treated by J. Grimm in his admirable Geschichte 

 der Deutschen Sprache. But even in the following voca- 



