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oilier Pelasgian towns, who have changed their names : all these people 

 speak the same language, and which is unintelligible to their neighbours. 

 If this conjecture be well founded, it will follow that the Athenians, who 

 were of Pelasgic origin, lost their original language, and adopted that of 

 the Hellenians, when they came among that people, while the other 

 Pelasgians have retained their language without alteration. Few and feeble 

 when they separated themselves from the body of the Pelasgians, they 

 augmented their numbers and strength, by incorporating with other tribes 

 of barbarians, which the Pelasgians, not doing, have never increased." 



Again, he says, "the lonians, so long as they dwelt in that part of the 

 Peloponnesus now called Achaia, and before the time when Danaus and 

 Xuthus came into Peloponnesus, were, as the Greeks affirm, called 

 ^Egialian Pelasgians, but afterward lonians, from Ion, son of Xuthus :" 

 and, further, " the Athenians, when the country now called Greece was 

 possessed by the Pelasgians, were also Pelasgians, and bore the name ol 

 Cranaans ; but, under their king, Cecrops, they were called Cecropians ; 

 and when Erechtheus assumed the supreme power, they changed that 

 name for the appellation Athenians. Afterwards, Ion, son of Xuthus, 

 being their general, the Athenians were, from him, called lonians ." 



The Achaeans, it would appear, expelled the lonians from the Pelo- 

 ponnesus, or a great portion of it, usurping the twelve cantons, into which 

 the latter had divided it. Pausanias regards the Pelasgi as originally 

 Siceli, 2tKeAoi, who had passed over into Acarnania. Whoever the Pelasgi, 

 the Hellenes, the Achaeans, and other tribes of early Greece were, it is vain, 

 now, to pretend to decide. As respects the Pelasgi, indeed, Archdeacon 

 Williams says, that they were everywhere to be found ; viz., " in Asia, in 

 Crete, in the other islands, in Thrace, Thessaly, Epirus, Peloponnesus, and 

 Italy ; but it is impossible to prove that they were a race distinct in blood 

 from the older inhabitants of these countries. The word, distorted as it has 

 been by various attempts at etymology, seems a very simple compound 

 of the two words, vreXa (pela), the old Macedonian for a stone, and aorKeiv 

 (askein), to work or dress with care. These two words would form 

 7re\aa-Kos (pelaskos), which, by a slight change in pronunciation, would 

 become TreXao-yoy (pelasgos). It is clear that they belonged to that race 

 call them Trojans, Pelasgians, Thracians, Phrygeans, or any other 

 equivalent name who sunk under the superior energies of the Achaean 

 and Hellenic races." 



Thus compounded, originally, of distinct tribes, more or less imme- 

 diately related to each other by consanguinity, appears to have been 

 the population of Greece, which long continued divided into independent 

 states. Of these tribes, and especially of the Hellenic, offsets branched out 

 into Italy, colonizing its eastern portion, and founding cities, now known 

 by name alone : of the earliest of these, were Arpi and Canusium ; 



