vii.j METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 139 



acquire that of a distinct nation, without a change of blood 

 corresponding with the change of language. Desmoulins 

 long ago put this argument exceedingly well : 



" Let us imagine the recurrence of one of those slow, or sudden, 

 political revolutions, or say of those secular changes which among 

 different people and at different epochs have annihilated historical 

 monuments and even extinguished tradition. In that case, the evidence, 

 now so clear, that the negroes of Hayti were slaves imported by a 

 French colony, who, by the 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." 1 



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 uncivilized 

 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 intermixed ; 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, not found in our tongue, very 

 probably exists in our pedigrees. The ethnology of France is still 

 more complicated. Many writers make the Parisian a Roman on the 



1 Desmoulins, " Ilistoire Naturelle des Races Humaines." p. 345. 1826. 



