216 METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY iv 



very effect of the subordination involved in slavery lost their 

 own diverse languages and adopted that of their masters, would 

 vanish. And metaphysical philosophers, observing the 

 identity of Haytian French with that spoken on the shores 

 of the Seine and the Loire, would argue that the men of St. 

 Domingo with woolly heads, black and oily skins, small calves, 

 and slightly bent knees, are of the same race, descended from 

 the same parental stock, as the Frenchmen with silky brown, 

 chestnut, or fair hair, and white skins. For they would say, 

 their languages are more similar than French is to German or 

 Spanish." l 



It must not be imagined that the case put by 

 Desmoulins is a merely hypothetical one. Events 

 precisely similar to the transport of a body of 

 Africans to the West India Islands, indeed, cannot 

 have happened among uncivilised races, but 

 similar results have followed the importation of 

 bodies of conquerors among an enslaved people 

 over and over again. There is hardly a country 

 in Europe in which two or more nations speaking 

 widely different tongues have not become inter- 

 mixed ; and there is hardly a language of Europe 

 of which we have any right to think that its 

 structure affords a just indication of the amount 

 of that intermixture. 



As Dr. Latham has well said : 



"It is certain that the language of England is of Anglo- 

 Saxon origin, and that the remains of the original Keltic are 

 unimportant. It is by no means so certain that the blood of 

 Englishmen is equally Germanic. A vast amount of Kelticism, 



1 Desmoulins, Histoire Naturelle des Eaces ffiimaincs, p. 345, 

 1826. 



