the Germanic Races into Europe. 39 



am Inclined to limit the Keltic area, at its maximum exten- 

 sion, 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. 169.) 



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

 Invasion of Rome and Central Italy by the Gauls was no in- 

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

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

 century of our era. May it not, however, indicate to us other 

 intrusions of which it was a secondary cause ? My belief is 

 that it does. It is abundantly obvious that some great cause 

 of dismemberment 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 Illyricum, 

 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 destruc- 

 tive influences of its scattered fragments. This was the wan- 

 ing struggle of the great Keltic stock. Upwards of two thou- 

 sand 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 ethnolo- 

 gist ; but assuredly their days are numbered, the hold of 

 twenty centuries is at length giving way, and it seems pro- 

 bable 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 Keltee 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 displaced, and the classic nations superseded, is the Germanic 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 mem- 

 bers. The intrusion of the Germanic stock into Europe lies 

 beyond the assigned dates of ancient history ; but many indi- 

 cations serve to show, that while the Keltic races only obtrude 



