viit.] BRITISH ETHNOLOGY. 177 



may have been the extent to which the Celtic-speaking 

 population of the eastern half of Britain was trodden 

 out and supplanted by the Teutonic-speaking Saxons and 

 Danes, it is quite certain that no considerable displace- 

 ment of the Celtic-speaking people occurred in Cornwall, 

 Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland ; and that nothing 

 approaching to the extinction of that people took place 

 in Devonshire, Somerset, or the western moiety of Britain 

 generally. Nevertheless, the fundamentally Teutonic 

 English language is now spoken throughout Britain, 

 except by an insignificant fraction of the population in 

 Wales and the Western Highlands. But it is obvious 

 that this fact affords not the slightest justification for the 

 common practice of speaking of the present inhabitants 

 of Britain as an "Anglo-Saxon" people. It is, in fact, 

 just as absurd as the habit of talking of the French 

 people as a " Latin " race, because they speak a language 

 which is, in the main, derived from Latin. And the 

 absurdity becomes the more patent when those who have 

 no hesitation in calling a Devonshire man, or a Cornish 

 man, an "Anglo-Saxon," would think it ridiculous to call 

 a Tipperary man by the same title, though he and his 

 forefathers may have spoken English for as long a time 

 as the Cornish man. 



Ireland, at the earliest period of which we have any 

 knowledge, contained like Britain, a dark and a fair 

 stock, which, there is every reason to believe, were 

 identical with the dark and the fair stocks of Britain. 

 When the Irish first became known they spoke a Gaelic 

 dialect, and though, for many centuries, Scandinavians 

 made continual incursions upon, and settlements among 

 them, the Teutonic languages made no more way among 

 the Irish than they did among the French. How much 

 Scandinavian blood was introduced there is no evidence 

 to show. But after the conquest of Ireland by Henry II., 



