1876.] The Cradle of Civilisation . 453 
weight. We cannot lay claim to any philological authority, 
but those most profoundly versed in the science of language 
declare that the languages of India and of Western Europe 
all belong to one great family, and point to one common 
root. Where, then, is the wonder if an Indian name is 
capable of receiving a Frisian etymology ? 
In the account of the visit of Ulysses to Holland there is 
one very peculiar circumstance. The Frisians throughout 
this book are represented pre-eminently as the seafaring 
people of the world — the only nation who could or might 
navigate the sea of Wr-alda, or the great ocean . Yet the 
ships of Ulysses are described as “ finer than any that we 
possessed or had ever seen.” This, too, after having been 
driven about for years in strange seas, where they must 
have been damaged and shattered, and where they could 
have found but few opportunities for refitting. 
Among the further suspicious features of the “ Oera Linda 
Book ” we are struck with its manner of appealing to that 
national pride in which, despite his phlegma, Mynheer is 
no wise deficient.* To the foreigner, Holland seems gene- 
rally — perhaps too generally — a mere swampy appendage of 
Germany which has accidentally acquired independence, and 
its language a mere vulgarised form of German, or, as it has 
been humorously described, “ German spoken during a bad 
fit of sea-sickness.” Even such an author as Jean Paul 
Richter could so far forget the honourable and splendid part 
taken by Holland during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and 
eighteenth centuries, in the development of science, as to 
characterise the Dutchman as a “ cheap edition of the 
German, printed on inferior paper, and without illustrations.” 
But to the Dutchman who receives Dr. Ottema’s revelations 
his country is no mere fragment of Germany, but the relic 
of a vast region to which imagination supplies the only limit 
“the originator of alphabetical writing and of our arith- 
metical notation, the instructress and civiliser of Greece, of 
Hetruria, perhaps of Phenicia, great alike in arms, in legis- 
lation, and in commerce, and planting her institutions even 
as far as the Punjab S We must further notice the side- 
blows dealt at the three mighty neighbours of Holland. 
France has proved herself dangerous and aggressive alike 
under Louis le Grand and under the first Napoleon. Ac- 
* Witness the indignation excited by Washington Irving’s “ History of 
New Amsterdam.” Within the lifetime of the present generation a mere 
casual reference to this elegant writer has been known, in Dutch Society, to 
bring on the same ominous silence as might be provoked in an English 
drawing-room by the introduftion of some indecent topic. 
