1854.] 



ON THE INTRUSION OF THE GERMANIC RACES. 



24? 



might be expunged without sensibly marring the richness and 

 copiousness of the language. Historically speaking, the English 

 language of the British islands stands in precisely the same 

 relation to its ancient geographical area as the English of Canada 

 does to this portion of its widely diffused modern area; in neither 

 is it the original language of any part of the countries to which 

 it now pertains, but in both cases it has spread itself within well 

 ascertained, though diverse periods, at the expense of earlier and 

 more aboriginal languages, which it has displaced and super- 

 seded. 



■ Looking, however, upon the older ethnological stock of British 

 and European population, to which the Keltic elements of 

 European languages and customs are traceable, it is important 

 to consider whether the well-ascertained date of its first appear- 

 ance on the stage of history above referred to, in any degree 

 coincides with that of its earliest intrusion into Europe, or with 

 the appearance of that other hardy barbarian stock, which, 

 issuing at a later period from its fastnesses in the old unexplored 

 north, swept before it, in its young strength, the decrepid ves- 

 . tiges of Rome's Imperial decline 1 In other words, I would in- 

 quire if the Keltic and Germanic races are coeval in their origin, 

 or in their occupation of the European areas which they are 

 found in possession of at the dawn of history ? 



" "We can trace," says Dr. Arnold, " with great distinctness 

 the period at which the Kelts became familiarly known to the 

 Greeks. Herodotus only knew of them from the Phoenician 

 navigators; Thucydides does not name them at all; Xenophon 

 only notices them as forming part of the auxiliary force sent by 

 Dionysius to the aid of Lacedemon ; Isocrates makes no men- 

 tion of them : but immediately afterwards, their incursions into 

 Central and Southern Italy on the one hand, and into the coun- 

 tries beyond the Danube and Macedonia on the other, had made 

 them objects of general interest and curiosity; and Aristotle 

 notices several points in their habits and character in different 

 parts of his philosophical works." Like the first glimpses of the 

 Kassiterides or Tin Countries of Southern Britain, we discern 

 only vaguely and by chance incidental notices, the western 

 Kelts, described by Herodotus as a people who " dwell without 

 the pillars of Hercules, and bordering on the Kynesians who 

 live the farthest to the west of all the nations of Europe."* Few 

 passages of ancient history convey to us a more vivid impression 

 of the complete isolation of the diverse tribes then scattered over 

 the European continent. The Pyrenees and the great Alpine 

 chain, spreading eastward to the head waters of the Danube, 

 formed in the age of the Father of history, a barrier of exclusion 

 for all the Transalpine races, scarcely less effectual than that 

 which, for upwards of eighteen centuries thereafter, concealed 

 this great antiquity, America, from the eyes of Europe. Kelts, 

 Kymric or Gaelic, had doubtless crossed the Alps long prior to 

 the first notice of them by Herodotus, and had established them- 

 selves in the fertile valley of the Po, as well as extended their 

 influence far southward into the Italian peninsula. Whether, 

 at that period, they had ever been present on any portion of the 

 Hellenic area of Greece, may well be questioned, nothwithstand- 



* This description Dr. Latham would refer to the Kelts as Iberian, 

 and not to the Kelts in the general sense in which the designation is 

 accepted, and as it was understood by the Romans in the time of 

 Caesar. Bat it is not at all improbable that the population of Gallicia 

 and the Biscayan provinces of Spain might have been purely Gallic 

 B.C. 400, and yet that the displaced Ibdri of the south might have 

 even crossed- the Garonne in Caesar's time. Immense displacement 

 had taken place during the interval in the Spanish peninsula. But 

 the name Garonne, like the Scottish Garry, is essential Celtic and de- 

 scriptive: Che rough river. 



ing tho undoubted Keltic elements recognized in the Greek 

 language. They had, however, already passed to the south 

 of the Pyrenees, and intermingling with the older Iberians 

 of Spain, constituted the ancient Keltiberian population of 

 Arragon and Valencia: unless, indeed, we are prepared to 

 recognize in the Keltae and Galatie of Aristotle and Diodorus 

 something more than varied forms of the same name; though 

 even then, the distinction will not necessarily imply a greater 

 one than the philologist recognizes between the Keltic elements 

 of the ancient Greek and Latin, or the ethnologist perceives to 

 separate the modern Gael and Kymri of Great Britain. 



To the Greeks of the age of Herodotus the Kelts were only 

 known, by the chance report of some Phcenician seaman, as one 

 among the rude tribes of the barbarian West, where the coasts 

 of Europe intruded furthest into the mysterious Atlantic main, 

 which was to them the aqueous boundary of the world. The 

 Greeks of that age little suspected that these same western 

 Kelts reached from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean as far as 

 the Alps, and overflowing and sweeping round them, already 

 occupied the valley of the Po, and extended nearly to the head 

 of the Adriatic. " The narrow band of coast occupied by the 

 Ligurian and Venetian tribes," says Dr. Arnold, when referring 

 to the approaching Gaulish invasion of Rome, " was as yet suffi- 

 cient to conceal the movements of the Kelts from the notice of 

 the civilized world. Thus, immediately before that famous erup- 

 tion which destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii, the level ridge 

 • which was then Vesuvius excited no suspicion ; and none could 

 imagine that there were lurking close below that peaceful surface 

 the materials of a fiery deluge, which were so soon to burst forth, 

 and to continue for centuries to work havoc and desolation." 



But though that celebrated eruption which took place in the 

 first century of the Christian era is the earliest on record, it is 

 well known to the geologist that the pent-up fires of Vesuvius 

 and Solfatara had long before overflowed the Phlegrajan fields ; 

 and, in like manner, the philologist recognizes, on no less indis- 

 putable evidence, the traces of earlier Keltic intrusions than that 

 which, iu the fourth century of Rome, swept like a wasting 

 torrent over Cental Italy. The attention of the members of the 

 Canadian Institute has recently been directed to the well known 

 Keltic element now universally recognized as forming so im- 

 portant a constituent part of the Latin tongue. This Professor 

 Newman assumes to be an essentially intrusive element; but in 

 doing so he recognizes it as derived from Italian races, which, if 

 not aboriginal, are known to us as the primitive inhabitants of 

 well-defined areas of the Italian peninsula at the very dawn of 

 histoiy. Among these Keltic Italians the Umbrians and the 

 Sabines are specially remarkable, and the essential* Celtic cha- 

 racter of the Sabine clanship, out of which the later Roman 

 clients, and the whole system of Roman patron and client, patres 

 and plebs, were naturally developed, points to a social condition 

 prevailing among the ancient tribes of Central Italy, and especially 

 among the Sabines, more easily explicable by the analogies of 

 modern Celtic clanship as it existed in Scotland down to the 

 middle of the eighteenth century, than by any other source 

 which history discloses to us. 



Assuming, with Prichard, Newman, and other able philo- 

 logical critics, the Kelticity of the Umbrians, and the Kelto- 

 Italian character of both the Umbrians and Sabines, we are left 



* For the purpose of discriminating between the undoubted modern 

 Kelticism of the Gael, Eymri, &c, of the British Isles and Bretagne, 

 and the assumed but disputable Kelticism, in this sense, of some 

 ancient ethnological elements — e. g., the Celtiberians of Spain — tho 

 term Keltic is employed here in reTerence to all ancient and purely 

 continental elements, that of Celtic to all modern and British elements. 



