upon British Ethnology. 
207 
50 b. c.; while Britain, in Caesar's time, was an island into 
which only a few Gaulish or other merchants had penetrated, 
and which was not completely overrun by Agricola before 
the year 84 a. d., or 184 years later., And Britain was 
abandoned by the Bomans at an earlier period in the fifth 
century than that at which Roman authority came to an end 
in Gaul, which being a much larger country than Roman 
Britain, and in a more civilized condition, both absorbed its 
invaders more easily and became much more thoroughly 
Romanized than its northern neighbour. In addition, the 
invaders of Gaul in the fifth century were Burgundians, 
Franks, Visigoths, and Huns, people by no means so closely 
allied to each other either in blood or language as the Angles, 
Saxons, and Jutes. Thoroughly Romanized Gaul, therefore, 
maintained its Latin tongue against its varied invaders with¬ 
out difficulty ; while in Britain, where the city probably spoke 
Latin, and the country people various British dialects, neither 
tongue had prestige enough to enable it to hold its ground 
against the speech of a mass of nearly homogeneous colonists. 
Similar reasons seem to me to explain the disappearance of 
Christianity in Eastern Britain, and its maintenance in Gaul; 
it is probable that the British country people were in the 
fifth century still mainly Pagan, while the cities of Britain 
had become Christian. 
It is thus obvious that the change of language and religion 
gives no presumption that the change of race was of an 
equally fundamental character, but leaves the question per¬ 
fectly open. For, as the case of Cornwall teaches us, a 
language may so increase a predominance originally slight 
as to be gradually accepted by a race, once speaking another 
tongue, without any corresponding change in blood accom¬ 
panying its diffusion. 
And as a language increases its ascendency and becomes 
the tongue of a larger and larger number of people alien in 
blood to its original speakers, they, on acquiring it, usually 
identify themselves with those whose language they have 
adopted, and often consider people much more really akin to 
them as a different race. Thus it has been noticed that no 
