24S 



ON THE INTRUSION OF THE GERMANIC RACES. 



[1854. 



in no doubt as to the antiquity of the Keltic ethnological element 

 in Southern Europe. Among the primitive native Italian popu- 

 lations, the Umbrians were, at the earliest times, the cultivators 

 of the soil and the builders of cities; and their ancient capital, 

 Ameria, was one of the oldest cities of Italy. Pliuy assigns the 

 date of its foundation 381 years before that of Rome. Speci- 

 mens of the language of this people have been preserved to us 

 in the celebrated Eugubine Inscriptions, discovered at Gobbio, 

 the ancient Iguvium, and the relation of this language to the 

 Latin has been satisfactorily assigned by Grolefend and others. 

 But without attempting to determine how far the famous Sabines 

 and Latins, or the less important tribes of Piceui, Vestini, Fren- 

 tani, and Marsi, which clustered around their aucient areas on 

 the east, approximated to the Umbrian type, it is sufficient for 

 our present purpose to know that " the primitive Latin must 

 have Keltized itself by imbibing Umbrian," {Newman's "Regal 

 Home]') and that the Keltic element of the Latin is derived, 

 being isolated and fragmentary, and only traceable to its etymo- 

 logical family-groups by a reference to the. surviving Celtic 

 dialects: we are hence left in no doubt that that appearance of 

 the Kelts or Gauls in Central Italy, B.C. 380, which Dr. Arnold 

 has characterized as their "beginning for the first time to take 

 their part in the great drama of the nations,'' was by no means 

 their earliest intrusion into Southern Europe. Dr. Latham, who 

 is little disposed to extend the Keltic area further than the 

 strictest evidence will sanction, and even denies the Kelticity of 

 the element mingling with the Iberian stock to constitute the 

 Celtiberi of Spain {Ethnology of Europe, p. 37), in restricting 

 the original area of this ancient race, remarks : — " I am inclined 

 to limit the Keltic area, at its maximum extension,, to Venice 

 westwards, and to the neighbourhood of Rome southwards. 

 But this is not enough," he adds, " they may have been 

 aboriginal in parts which they may seem to have invaded as 

 immigrants." — (Man and his Migrations, p. 1G9.) 



It may thus be assumed as obvious and undoubted, that the 

 invasion of Rome and Central Italy by the Gauls was no intru- 

 sion of a new race, like the first appearance in Europe of the 

 Huns in the fourth century, or of the Moors in the eighth cen- 

 tury of our era. May it not, however, indicate to us other in- 

 trusions of which it was a secondary cause? My belief is, that 

 it does. It is abundantly obvious that some great cause of dis- 

 memberment and revolution was then affecting the great Keltic 

 race. Whatever their older area may have been, we find the 

 Kelts soon after intruding into Thrace and lllyricum, and 

 appearing on the borders of Macedonia in the reigns of the great 

 Philip and Alexander. They even overflow into Asia; and, for 

 nearly two centuries, glance, meteor-like, on the pages of ancient 

 history, the dismembered relics of an old barbarian nationality, 

 terrible though transient in the destructive influences of its 

 scattered fragments. This was the waning struggle of the great 

 Keltic stock. Upwards of two thousand years have elapsed, and 

 still the fragments of that once predominant European branch 

 of the human family linger on the western confines of Europe, 

 preserving to us their ancient tongue, so invaluable for all the 

 investigations of the ethnologist; but assuredly their days are 

 numbered, the hold of twenty centuries is at length giving way, 

 and it seems probable that, ere many more generations have 

 passed, the living languages of the Kymri and the Gael will 

 exist only, like the Cornish, in grammars and vocabularies of the 

 philologist, and in the surviving fragments of their ancient 

 literature. 



The stock by which the ancient Keltre of Europe have been 

 displaced, and the classic nations" superseded, is the Germanic or 



so-called Teutonic group, of which our own Anglo-Saxon race is 

 the most powerful and widely diffused of all its members. The 

 intrusion of the Germanic stock into Europe lies beyond the 

 assigned dates of ancient history ; but many indications serve to 

 show, that while the Keltic races only obtrude upon the historic 

 arena in their decline, like some long-voyaging shijp seen for the 

 hist time as it dashes-amid the breakers of a strange and rock- 

 bound coast, the Germanic races dawn upon us in their young 

 barbarian strength, with all their national being still awaiting its 

 developement, and with the geographical arena of their historical 

 existence occupied by the precursors whom they came to dis- 

 place. Assuming, as a general rule, the uniform north-western 

 progression of European population from the Asiatic cradle-land 

 of the human race, to which science, no less than revelation, 

 points, we are thence led to assign a certain relative age to races 

 from their geographical position. In the extreme north are still 

 found the Ugrian Fins and Laps, pertaining to a stock whose 

 congeners abound in Asia and find their modern European re- 

 presentatives in the intrusive Majiars of Hungary, but who, as 

 an ancient European stock, appear as the probable representa- 

 tives of those Allophylioe, whose existence in the north of Europe 

 and in Britain, in periods prior to all written history, is now 

 generally accepted as an established truth. In like manner, the 

 mountainous Basque region of the Pyrenees shelters the last 

 remnant of the ancient Iberian stock, an unclassed, if not abori- 

 ginal AUophylian race; while, among the mountains of Albania 

 — like waifs caught in the eddy of the great western stream of 

 population — are still found the Skipetar, another unclassed race, 

 who, for ought that can be said to the contrary, may as truly 

 represent to us the aboriginal Pelasgi of Greece, as the Basques 

 undoubtedly do the Iberi of Spain. Leaving those, and coming 

 down in point of time to the Indo-European historic races, we 

 find the Gaelic Kelts in the extreme north-west, as in North 

 Britain and Ireland, and in Gaul, with the Kymric and other 

 Kelts, as the Welsh of England, and the Cimbri and even the 

 Teutones* of the northern shores of the European mainland, 



* The science of Ethnology is still so much in its infancy, that it 

 will least surprise the most zealous of its students to find its longest 

 accepted terms called in question. Dr. Latham has advanced reasons 

 in his "Ethnology of Europe," for believing that, "instead of the 

 ancicut Kelts of Iberia having been Kelts in the modern sense of the 

 word, the Kelts of Gallia were Iberians," i. e., were a different race 

 from the Gauls north of the Garonne. Next to the term Celtic, no 

 word is better established among English, though not among conti- 

 nental ethnologists, than Teutonic, as equivalent to Germanic, and 

 thereby contra-distinguished from Keltic. The term, however, is at 

 best arbitrary, at worst altogether false ; for it is by no meaus impro- 

 bable that the Teutoues were Keltic, as it is certain that the evidence 

 of Appian tends to show that both they and the Kymbri were of Gallic 

 origin. (Vide Latham's "Gcrmauia of Tacitus," pp. ex., clx., clxiv.) 

 The names Teutoncs and Teutoni have been mistakenly assumed as 

 derived from the German, deu/seh, teut-sclv=leict-cmi. But the word 

 signifying people, from which deulsrh is derived, is either written 

 ihiud, Anglo-Saxon thcod, or diut; never (hint, or theut, still less tout. 

 Tent, on the contrary, appears to be a Gallic syllable. We find, among 

 the Gauls, Teutomatus (Crcs. b. 7), Teutates (Lucan), Teutomalua 

 (Liv. epist.). One of the Teuton chiefs was called Toutobochus or 

 Teutobodus (Floras and Eutropius), while Pliny (v. 82) speaks of a 

 Galatie people : Teutobodiaci. Another of the captive Teuton chiefs 

 is named by Plutarch, Boiorix; while Livy (34, 40) names a Boiorix 

 of a " llegulus" among the Galli Insubres in Upper Italy. There 

 was a weapon peculiar to the Teutous, called cateja (vide Virgil, b. 7, 

 Teutonico ritu soliti vibrare cateias), which Isidor calls Genius Gallici 

 teli: the termination efa being strictly Gallic. Among the Belgs were 

 the Aduatici, whose name is purely Keltic, and even recalls that of the 

 Atacotti in Britain ; but these Aduatici were, according to Coasar, de- 

 scendants of the Cimbri and Teutoni. Old Festus (de signif. verborum) 

 says that the Ambrones who followed the Teutoni, were gens Gallka. 



