140 CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. [vn. 



strength of his language ; whilst others make him a Kelt 011 the 

 strength of certain moral characteristics, combined with the previous 

 Kelticism of the original Gauls. Spanish and Portuguese, as languages, 

 are derivations from the Latin ; Spain and Portugal, as countries, are 

 Iberic, Latin, Gothic, and Arab, in different proportions. Italian is 

 modern Latin all the world over yet surely there must be much 

 Keltic blood in Lombardy, and much Etruscan intermixture in 

 Tuscany. 



" In the ninth century every man between the Elbe and the Niemen 

 spoke some Slavonic dialect ; they now nearly all speak German. 

 Surely the blood is less exclusively Gothic than the speech." 1 



In other words, what philologer, if he had nothing 

 but the vocabulary and grammar of the French and 

 English languages to guide him, would dream of the 

 real causes of the unlikeness of a Norman to a Pro- 

 vencal, of an Orcadian to a Cornishman ? How readily 

 might he be led to suppose that the different climatal 

 conditions to which these speakers of one tongue have 

 so long been exposed, have caused their physical dif- 

 ferences ; and how little would he suspect that these are 

 due (as we happen to know they are) to wide differences 

 of blood. 



Few take duly into account the evidence which exists 

 as to the ease with which unlettered savages gain or 

 lose a language. Captain Erskine, in his interesting 

 " Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western 

 Pacific/' especially remarks upon the "avidity with 

 which the inhabitants of the polyglot islands of Melanesia, 

 from New Caledonia to the Solomon Islands, adopt the 

 improvements of a more perfect language than their 

 own, which different causes and accidental communica- 

 tion still continue to bring to them ; " and he adds that 

 " among the Melanesian islands scarcely one was found 

 by us which did not possess, in some cases still im- 

 perfectly, the decimal system of numeration in addition 

 to their own, in which they reckon only to five." 



1 Latham, "Man and his Migrations," p. 171. 



