THE
ETHNOLOGY OF EUROPE.
BY
R. G. LATHAM, M.D.,
ETC.
LONDON:
JOHN VAN VOORST, PATERNOSTER ROW.
—
M.DCCC.LII.
LONDON:
Printed by Samuel Bentley and Co.,
Bangor House, Shoe Lane.
CHAPTER I. | |
PAGE | |
Preliminary Observations.—The Physical Peculiarities of Europe.—General Sketch of its Ethnology.—Statement of Problems.—The Skipetar, or Albanians.—Their Language, Descent.—The Four Tribes.—How far a Pure Stock.—Elements of Intermixture. | 1 |
CHAPTER II. | |
Spain and Portugal.—The Euskaldunac, or Basques.—The Iberian Stock.—The Turdetanian Civilization.—Phœnician, Roman, Vandal, Gothic Elements.—Keltiberians.—The Original Keltæ Iberians.—The Word “Keltic” of Iberian Origin.—The Arab Conquest.—Expulsion of the Arabs.—The Jews of Spain.—Gipsies.—Physical and Moral Characteristics of the Modern Spaniards.—Portugal. | 21 |
CHAPTER III. | |
France.—Iberian Blood in Gaul as well as the Spanish Peninsula.—Iberians of Gascony, &c.—Ligurians.—How far Keltic.—Bodencus.—Intermixture.—Roman, German, Arab.—Alsatia.—Lorraine.—Franche-Comté.—Burgundy, Southern, Western, and Northern France.—Character of the Kelts.—The Albigensian Crusade.—Belgium.—Its Elements.—Keltic, German, and Roman.—Switzerland.—Helvetia.—Romance, French, and German Languages. | 47 |
CHAPTER IV. | |
Italy.—Ligurians.—Etruscans.—Venetians and Liburnians.—Umbrians.—Ausonians.—Latins.—Earliest Populations of North-Eastern Italy.—South Italians.—Italian Origin of the Greeks.—Sicilians.—Elements of Admixture.—Herulian.—Gothic.—Lombard.—Arab.—Norman.—Analytical Sketch of the Population of Modern Italy. | 80 |
CHAPTER V. | |
Importance of Clearness of Idea respecting the Import of the Word “Race.”—The Pelasgi.—Area of Homeric Greece.—Acarnania not Hellenic.—The Dorians.—Egyptian, Semitic, and other Influences.—Historical Greece.—Macedonians.—Greece under Rome and Byzantium.—Inroads of Barbarians.—The Slavonic Conquest.—Recent Elements of Admixture. | 125 |
CHAPTER VI. | |
Russian Populations Sarmatian and Turanian.—Samoeids Turanian.—Ugrians.—Lapps.—Kwains.—Esthonians.—Liefs.—Permians.—Siranians.—Votiaks.—Tsheremiss, Tshuvatsh, Morduin.—Lithuanians.—Malorussians and Muscovites.—Their recent Introduction.—The Skoloti.—Early Displacements.—Ugrian Glosses.—Indian Affinities of the Lithuanic.—Russian Poland.—Analytical View of the Present Populations of Russia.—Arkhangel.—Finland.—Esthonia.—Livonia.—Perm.—Simbirsk, Penza.—Lithuania.—Volhynia.—Kharkhov.—Kosaks.—Kherson.—Taurida. | 146 |
CHAPTER VII. | |
Wallachia and Moldavia.—Rumanyos.—Descent from the Daci.—Sarmatian Origin.—Servia.—Montenegro | 182 |
CHAPTER VIII. | |
Frisian, Saxon, Dutch, and Gothic Germans.—Germanized Kelts.—Germanized Slaves.—Prussia.—Isolation of its Areas.—East and West Prussia.—Prussian Poland.—Pomerania.—Prussian Silesia.—Prussian Saxony.—Brandenburg.—Uckermark.—South-Western Portion.—Westphalian and Rhenish Prussia.—Mecklenburg.—Saxony.—Linones of Luneburg.—Hanover and Oldenburg.—Holland.—Hesse-Cassel, Hesse-Darmstadt, Nassau.—Baden.—Wurtemburg.—Weimar.—Rhenish Bavaria.—Danubian Bavaria. | 187 |
CHAPTER IX. | |
Great Britain.—Denmark.—The Islands.—The Vithesleth.—Fyen.—Lauenburg.—Holstein.—Sleswick.—Jutland.—Iceland.—The Feroe Isles.—Norway.—Sweden.—Lapps.—Kwains.—Gothlanders.—Angermannians.—Theory of the Scandinavian Population. | 199 |
CHAPTER X. | |
Rumelia.—The Turk Stock.—Zones of Conquest.—Early Intrusions of Turk Populations Westward.—Thracians.—The Ancient Macedonians.—The Pelasgi of Macedonia.—Bosnia, Herzegovna and Turkish Croatia.—Bulgaria. | 221 |
CHAPTER XI. | |
Austria.—Bukhovinia, Gallicia, and Lodomiria.—Bohemia and Moravia.—Austrian Silesia.—Dalmatia.—Croatia.—Carniola.—Carinthia.—Styria.—Saltzburg, the Tyrol, the Vorarlberg.—Upper and Lower Austria.—Hungary. | 238 |
ERRATUM. (corrected by etext transcriber.)
Page 3, line 6, for greater read less.
PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS.—THE PHYSICAL PECULIARITIES OF EUROPE.—GENERAL SKETCH OF ITS ETHNOLOGY.—STATEMENT OF PROBLEMS.—THE SKIPETAR, OR ALBANIANS.—THEIR LANGUAGE, DESCENT.—THE FOUR TRIBES.—HOW FAR A PURE STOCK.—ELEMENTS OF INTERMIXTURE.
THE proper introduction to the ethnology of Europe is the following series of preliminaries:—
1. The physical peculiarities of the quarter of the world so called;
2. A general view of the stocks, families, or races which occupy it;
3. A statement of the chief problems connected with the Natural History of its populations.
1. The physical conditions of Europe are as remarkable in respect to their negative as their positive characters; in other words, there is a great number of points wherein Europe differs from Asia, Africa, America, and Polynesia, in respect to what it has not, as well as in respect to what it has.
These negative points will be treated first.
a. No part of Europe lies between the Tropics; so that the luxuriance of a spontaneous and varied vegetation, with its pernicious tendencies to incline the habits of its population to idleness, is wanting. The rank and rapid growth of the plants which serve as food to men and animals, and which dispense with labour, nowhere occurs.
b. No part comes under the class of Steppes; or, at most, but imperfectly approaches their character. In Asia, the vast table-lands of the centre, occupied by the Turks and Mongols, have ever been the cradle of an active, locomotive, hungry, and aggressive population. And these have seen, with a strong desire to possess, the more favoured areas of the south; and have conquered them accordingly. The Luneburg Heath, and parts of Hanover are the nearest resemblances to the great Steppes of Mongolia, and Independent Tartary; but they are on a small and beggarly scale. In Russia, where the land is flat and level, the ground is also fertile, so that agriculture has been practicable, and (being practicable) has bound the occupant to the soil, instead of mounting him on fleet horses to wander with his flocks and herds from spot to spot, to become a shepherd by habit, and a warrior by profession; for in all countries, shepherds and hunters are marauders on a small, and conquerors on a large scale.
c. Europe is narrowest in its northern parts. This has had the effect of limiting those populations of the colder climes, whose scanty means of subsistence at home, incline them to turn their faces southwards, with the view of conquest, and supply them with numbers to effect their purpose.
d. Its diameter from north to south is less than its diameter from east to west. This has kept the mass of its population within a similar climate; or, if not within a similar climate, within a range of temperature far less wide than that which separates the African, the American, or the Asiatic of the northern parts of their respective continents from the Hottentot of the Cape, the Fuegian of Cape Horn, and the Malay of the Malayan Peninsula. It has given uniformity to its occupants; since varieties increase as we proceed from south to north, but not as we go from east to west—or vice versâ.
Amongst its positive features the most remarkable are connected with its mountain-ranges, the extent of its sea-board, and the direction of its rivers.
a. In no country are the great levels more broken by mountains, or the great mountains more in contiguity to considerable tracts of level country. The effect of this is to give the different characters of the Mountaineer and the Lowlander more opportunity of acting and reacting on each other.
b. In no country are the coasts more indented. We may look in vain for such a sea-board as that of Greece, elsewhere. The effect of this is to give the different characters of the sailor and landsman, the producer and the trader, more opportunity of acting and reacting on each other.
c. Its greatest rivers fall into seas navigable throughout the year. Contrast with this the great rivers of Asia, the Obi, the Lena, the Yenesey, and others, which for the purposes of navigation are useless; falling, as they do, into an Arctic sea.
d. Our greatest river, the Danube, runs from east to west. This ensures a homogeneous character for the population along its banks. Contrast with this the Nile, the Missisippi, and the Yenesey, in all of which the simple effect of climate creates a difference between the populations of the source and the embouchure. The great rivers of China do the same as the Danube; but the Danube differs from them, and from all other rivers running in a like direction, in emptying itself into an inland sea; a sea which gives the opportunity of communication not only with the parts north and south of the rivers which fall into it, but with those to the east of it also. The Hoang-ho and Kiang-ku empty themselves into an ocean, that, in these days of steam communication, leads to America, but which in the infancy of the world led to a coasting trade only, or, at most, to a large island—Japan. The Baltic and Mediterranean act, to a certain degree, in the same manner. The one has Africa, the other Scandinavia, to ensure its being put to the uses of trade.
In no part of the world do the differences between the varieties of the human species lie within narrower limits than in Europe. The most extreme opponents to the doctrine of the unity of our kind have never made many species out of the European specimens of the genus Homo. And these are by no means of the most satisfactory sort.
They are unsatisfactory for the following reasons. The differences that are inferred from dissimilarity of language, are neutralised by an undoubted similarity of physical form. The dissimilarities that are inferred from peculiarities of physical form are neutralised by undeniable affinities of speech. Looking to his size and colour, the Laplander is far, very far, removed from the Fin. Yet the languages belong to one and the same class. Looking to their tongues, the Basque of the Pyrenees, and the Skipetar (or Albanian of Albania) are each isolated populations. Yet their form is but slightly different from those of the other Europeans.
Now the physical condition of our continent makes the intermixture of blood, and the diffusion of ideas easy: and, I believe, that the effects of both are more notable in Europe than elsewhere.
2. The families, stocks, or races, which occupy Europe will be taken in the order which is most convenient; so that it will be practical rather than scientific.
a. In Malta the language is Arabic, and, of course, to a certain extent, the blood also. But Malta is European only in respect to its political relations. Still its population requires notice.
b. The Osmanlis, or Turks of Turkey, are Asiatic rather than European; an intrusive population whose introduction is within its historical period. I will not say, however, that in the parts between the Dnieper and Don, members of the same great stock may not have been settled in the times anterior to history. In the following pages, the Turks of Europe will be called Osmanlis, or Ottomans: since the word Turk is a generic name applied to the family to which they, along with the Independent Tartars, the Uzbeks, the Turcomans, the Turks of Asia Minor, the Yakuts on the borders of the Icy Sea, and several other great branches, extending to the frontier of China, and the mouth of the Lena, belong. The Turk is European, as the New Englander is American; i.e., not strictly so.
c. To a certain extent this foreign origin must be attributed to a member of the next family—the Majiar of Hungary. He conquered his present occupancy in the tenth century. He differs, however, from the Turk, in belonging to a class, group, or stock of populations which, although Asiatic to a great extent, is European as well. This is the stock which is called—
The Ugrian, a stock which is the only one common to both Europe and Asia, and contains the Lapps, the Finlanders, the Esthonians, and some other smaller populations on the European feeders of the Volga. The particular branch, however, from which the Majiars were derived is Asiatic.
The next two stocks consist of a single family each, and they are mentioned together because they are so isolated as to have no known affinities either with each, or with any other population. These are—
d. The Basques of Biscay and Gascony, i.e., the Western Pyrenees; once spread over the whole of the Spanish peninsula, and for that reason commonly called Iberian—
e. The Skipetar, or Albanians of Albania.
I am taking, as aforesaid, the populations in the order of convenience, and the next is
f. The Keltic.[1] This stock was indigenous to the water-systems of the Loire, the Seine, and the Rhone, in other words, to the whole of France north of the Garonne; to the south of which river lay the Iberians. From Gaul it spread to Great Britain. Its present representatives are the Bretons of Brittany, the Welsh, the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland, and the Manxmen of the Isle of Man—
g. The Gothic or German—
h. The Sarmatian, or Slavono-Lithuanic, containing the Slavonians and Lithuanians of Russia, Poland, Bohemia, Servia, Carinthia, Lithuania, with other less important areas, and lastly—
i. The classical or Greco-Latin stock of Italy and Greece, completing the list of the European stocks.
These three are more closely allied to each other than any of the previous ones. They are also nearer the Keltic; so much so, that a single class has been made out of the four, a class called Indo-European. The study, however, of the value of classes is in its infancy. The real fact that they are allied to an extent to which the others are not, is important.
Such are the existing groups; but when we consider how small is the number of the Basques, the only present representatives of the great Iberian class, and that their preservation to the present time is mainly due to the accidental circumstances of their occupancy of a stronghold in the Pyrenees, a new series of facts is suggested. The likelihood of stocks now extinct having once existed, presents itself; and with it, a fresh question.
The same suggestion arises when we look at the country occupied by the intrusive families of the Osmanlis and the Majiars of Rumelia and Hungary. The populations here are comparatively new-comers; yet it was no uninhabited tracts that they appropriated. Who was there before them? Perhaps some members of one of the stocks now existing. Perhaps, a wholly different family now extinct.
Again—the displacements effected by the different European populations, one with another, have been enormous. See how the Saxons over-ran England, the Romans Spain and Gaul. How do we know that some small stock was not annihilated here? History, it may be said, tells us the contrary. From history we learn that all the ancient Spaniards were allied to the ancestors of the Basques, all Gaul to those of the Bretons, all England to those of the Welsh. Granted. But what does history tell us about Bavaria, Styria, the Valley of the Po, or Ancient Thrace? In all these parts the present population is known to be recent, and the older known next to not at all. The reconstruction of the original populations of such areas as these is one of the highest problems in ethnology. To what did they belong, an existing stock more widely extended than now, or a fresh stock altogether?
My own belief is, that the number of European stocks for which there is an amount of evidence sufficient to make their extinction a reasonable doctrine, is two—two and no more; and, even with these, the doctrine of their extinction is only reasonable.
a. The old Etruscans are the first of these;
b. The Pelasgi the second.
Each will be noticed in its proper place.
I have used the word extinction. I must now qualify it; reminding the reader that this very qualification introduces a new and difficult subject. Extinction often means no more than the abolition of the outward and visible signs of ethnological difference. A negro marries a white. In the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh generation, as the case may be, his descendant is, to all intents and purposes, a white man. Yet the negro blood is not extinguished. It exists, though in a small proportion.
Again—a Cornishman loses his native language and speaks English as his mother tongue. Many generations before he did this he differed from the Englishman in speech only. Is his British blood extinguished? No. The chief sign of it has been lost. That is all.
Stocks may intermix, and—
Stocks may lose their characteristics.
Now both these phenomena are eminently common in European ethnology; and this is what we expect from history. Two populations, the Roman and the German, have more than doubled their original areas. Were all the old inhabitants, male and female, old and young, in the countries that they appropriated, put to the sword? We hope and believe the contrary. In most cases we know they were not. Sometimes there was intermarriage. This produced intermixture. Sometimes the language, religion, laws, and habits of the conquerors were adopted by the conquered. This was a loss of characteristics. So far greater than the influences of all the other populations of Europe have been those of the Germans and the Romans (to which, for the eastern part of the continent, we must add the Turks), that for nearly half Europe, whenever the question will be one of great intermixture, the basis will be Keltic, Iberic, or Sarmatian as the case may be, with Romans or Germans for the source of the superadded elements.
3. The chief problems of the present volume will, for the present, only be stated; the results being reserved for the conclusion. They are two—
a. The extent to which what is commonly called Race is the result of circumstances, or whether circumstances be the effect of race, i.e. whether Race (so called) is a cause or an effect?
b. The extent to which differences of what is called race is an element in national likes and dislikes, predilections or antipathies.
It cannot be denied that each of these is a point of practical as well as theoretical importance.
* * * *
The areas with which it is most convenient to begin, are those of the two isolated stocks, the Skipetar (Albanian), and the Iberian,—Albania and the Spanish peninsula. Of these Albania will be taken first.
Many writers have considered the Albanian and the Iberic stocks to be the two oldest in Europe; and there is no want of reasonable grounds for the doctrine. It is not, however, for this reason that they come first in the list.
Nor is it because the Skipetar of Albania are the more eastern of the two that they take precedence of the Iberians; although, in the eyes of such inquirers as deduce the European populations from Asia, their position on the frontier of Europe gives good grounds for doing so.
The true reason is practical rather than scientific, arising out of the line of criticism which will be found necessary for the forthcoming investigation.
It is so convenient to take Gaul next to the Spanish peninsula, Italy next to Gaul, and Greece next to Italy, that the necessity for breaking the continuity of the arrangement when we come to Albania must be avoided; and this is done by dealing with Albania at the very first, and getting its ethnology disposed of as a preliminary. It could not be taken in hand after that of Greece, for reasons which will appear when we come to that country.
The native name of the Albanians is Skipetar, or Mountaineer, and this is of some importance; as will be seen in the sequel. The word Albanian is, I think, Roman. Arvanitæ is the form found in the Byzantine writers. This is converted by the Turks into Arnaout. It is unlucky that the word is one which appears elsewhere, viz., in Caucasus, where the ancient name of the modern province of Daghestan is called Albania in the classical writers. So is Scotland; and so also part of England; Albyn being the Gaelic name out of which our French neighbours get their Albion perfide, for the purposes of rhetoric and poetry. It cannot be denied that the occurrence of forms so similar is strange; and it is against the chances that it should be accidental. The explanation which suggests itself is as follows. Pliny mentions a people termed Albanenses, as one of the Liburnian tribes; whilst Ptolemy gives us a town called Albanopolis in the southern part of Illyricum. Now, as we know that the name is not native, as we seek for it in vain amongst the early Greek writers, and as the opposite coast of Italy was occupied by the Cisalpine and Cispadane Gauls, we have reasons for considering Albyn as applied to Scotland, and Albyn as applied to the mountainous country on the eastern side of the Adriatic and Ionian seas, to be one and the same word, referable to one and the same Keltic group of tongues. Hence, it contains the root Alp=mountain, and translates the native name Skipetar=mountaineer, &c.
Like all such coincidences it has done mischief in the way of ethnology. Though few have derived the Skipetar from Scotland, many have done so from Caucasus—and that on the strength of the name. Yet it is as little native in the one locality as the other, since no nation of Daghestan calls itself Albanian, a fact which precludes all arguments in favour of a real community of origin from the similarity of name in limine; or rather a fact which ought to do so, for the Caucasian origin of the Skipetar still has its supporters.
Their present area extends from Montenegro to the Gulf of Arta; the northern frontier being Slavonic, the southern Greek. Eastwards it reaches the back-bone of Turkey, or the watershed between the small rivers which empty themselves into the Adriatic, and the larger ones which fall into the Ægean—a very Switzerland for its ruggedness. Hence, the Skipetar are a nation of Highlanders, more so than any other population of Europe, since the Basques of the Pyrenees are inconsiderable in area, and the Swiss are divided between the Germans, the French, the Roman, and the Italian families. They lie, too, more to the south than any other mountaineers, and it is not very fanciful to imagine that if they were Lowlanders, their skin and hair would approach that of the Greeks, with some of whom they lie under the same parallel. If so, their mountain habitat counteracts the effect of their southern sun, by a species of compensation common in many parts of the world.
The testimony of travellers to their belonging to the fair-complexioned and grey-eyed populations is pretty general, although Skene gives the Mirdite tribe a swarthy complexion and black eyes. The evidence, too, as to their bulk and stature varies; some writers giving them spare, light, and tall forms, others making them shorter, and more square-built than the Greek. That the eye has less animation, and the countenance less vivacity (in other words, that the Albanian is heavy-featured as compared with his quick-witted neighbours) is certain.
Both the men and women are hardy, and expose their bodies freely to the atmosphere, accustoming themselves to an out-door life amongst their flocks and herds, and dwelling, when indoors, in rude huts. Like the Swiss, they willingly let out their valour and hardihood in military service; and the best and most unscrupulous soldiers of the sultan are those recruits, who partly by force, partly by pay, are brought from Albania. Hence we find Albanians far beyond the pale of Albania; in Greece, in Thrace, in Asiatic Turkey, in Egypt, and even in Persia. The tribes, too, amongst themselves indulge in the right of private quarrel, rarely rising to the dignity of warfare, but more like the old border-feuds of England and Scotland. With the Slavonians of Montenegro, different from themselves in blood and political relations, the warfare is more bitter and serious, and the Albano-Slavonic frontier is the continual scene of aggression and reprisal and intrigue.
It was only under their famous chieftain, George Castriote, or Scanderbeg, that the Skipetar played the part of a nation of any importance in European history, and here their actions were what we expect beforehand—those of brave mountaineers, to whom war is a habit, and with whom dependence has always been but nominal. To the intellectual and moral history of Europe they have contributed nothing. Their alphabet is the Greek, slightly modified, and their literature either unwritten, or confined to ecclesiastical subjects.
Creeds sit easy upon them. Before the Ottoman conquest they were Christians, partly of the Greek, partly of the Roman church. At present they are divided between the three, the majority being Mahometans.
The Skipetar language has long drawn the attention of philologists; for it has long been known to be as little like the Greek and Slavonic of the parts around, as it is to the Turkish. The notion that it was a mere medley of the three soon disappeared; and when the Albanian became recognised as a separate substantive language, its remarkable isolation was a source of great doubt and perplexity. The latest author who has investigated it, Xylander, considers it to be Indo-European, and in this Prichard agrees with him. I think, however, that it cannot be placed in that group without enlarging the extent of the class, i.e., without changing the meaning of the term. Whatever it may be, it is not intermediate to the Latin and Greek, a fact of which the import will be seen when we come to the ethnology of Greece and Italy.
The Skipetar fall into the following divisions, clans, or tribes.
1. The Gheghides, containing—
a. The proper Gheghides, the most northern of the Skipetar, conterminous with the Slavonic countries of Montenegro, Bosnia, and Herzegovna, bounded on the south by the river Drin—
b. The Mirdites, south of the Drin, in the province of Croia, who like the Gheghides, are Christians.
The Gheghides, as a class, are dark-skinned and black-eyed.
2. The Toskides of Toskuria, or the country between Croia and the Vojutza, the least mountainous part of Albania and containing the valleys of the Sternatza and the Beratina, are more light than dark, with blue or grey eyes.
3. The Liapides of Liapuria, or the valley and water-shed of the Deropuli and the parts about Delvinaki, are the worst-looking and most demoralized of the Skipetar. Such at least is their character.
4. The Dzhami of Dzhamuria are the most agricultural. They extend from the Liapides on the north, to the Greek frontier southward, Parga and Suli being two of their towns.
The purity of the Albanian blood is considerable; and I believe that, as the Skipetar were once spread far wider in every direction than they are to be found at present,[2] and as their frontier has receded, the amount of Albanian blood beyond Albania is very great, whereas the foreign blood within Albania itself is but slight. The dark complexions of the Gheghides may, or may not, be referable to Slavonic intermixture. The lighter skins of the Toskides may, or may not, indicate purity. It is worth remarking, however, that the fair complexion is found in the parts most removed from the frontier, as well as in the parts where the intermixture (such as it is) has been the least.
The Taulantii and Parthini are the populations of antiquity, whose localities coincide with that of the Toskides. The colonies of Epidamnus and Apollonia suggest the notion of Greek, the Via Egnatia of Roman intermixture.
The Liapides are in the country of the Orestæ and Atintanes, the Gheghs in that of the Encheleæ, the Mirdites in that of the Pirustæ. In the northern part of their area was the colony of Epidaurus, and the Dalmatian frontier.
Hitherto the opportunities of intermixture have been but slight. With that part, however, of Albania which coincides with the ancient Epirus, rather than with Southern Illyria the case is different.
In the time of Pyrrhus it was Hellenized, and at the very earliest dawn of history its population was modified still more considerably. By whom? By the inhabitants of the opposite coast of Italy, whoever they were.
This is as much as is necessary to say about the Skipetar of Albania at present. They are the descendants of the Southern Illyrians and the ancient Epirots—Chaonians, Thesprotians, Molossians, &c. They are pure in blood, as compared with nine-tenths of the rest of Europe; but still more or less mixed, the chief foreign elements being ancient Italian, Greek, and Roman.
SPAIN AND PORTUGAL.—THE EUSKALDUNAC, OR BASQUES.—THE IBERIAN STOCK.—THE TURDETANIAN CIVILIZATION.—PHŒNICIAN—ROMAN—VANDAL—GOTHIC ELEMENTS.—KELTIBERIANS.—THE ORIGINAL KELTÆ IBERIANS.—THE WORD KELTIC OF IBERIAN ORIGIN.—THE ARAB CONQUEST.—EXPULSION OF THE ARABS.—THE JEWS OF SPAIN.—GIPSIES.—PHYSICAL AND MORAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MODERN SPANIARDS.—PORTUGAL.
THE western extremity of the Pyrenees, where France and Spain join, gives us a locality rendered famous by the historical events of San Sebastian, and the legends of Fuenterabia, with the provinces of Bearn and Gascony on the French, and Navarre and Biscay on the Spanish, side of the mountains. Here it is where, although the towns, like Bayonne, Pampeluna, and Bilbao, are French or Spanish, the country people are Basques or Biscayans—Basques or Biscayans not only in the provinces of Biscay, but in Alava, Upper Navarre, and the French districts of Labourd and Soule. Their name is Spanish (the word having originated in that of the ancient Vascones), and it is not the one by which they designate themselves; though, possibly, it is indirectly connected with it. The native name is derived from the root Eusk-; which becomes Eusk-ara when the language, Eusk-kerria when the country, and Eusk-aldunac when the people are spoken of; so that the Basque language of the Biscayans of Biscay is, in the vernacular tongue, the Euskara of the Euskaldunac of Euskerria.
It is not for nothing that this difference of form has been indicated. In the classical writers we find more than one of the old Spanish populations mentioned under different derivatives from the same root, and sometimes a doubt is expressed by the writer in whose pages it occurs, as to whether there were two separate populations, or only one denoted by two synonymous names. Thus, side by side with the Bast-uli, we find the Bast-itani, and, side by side with the Turd-uli, the Turd-etani. Now respecting these last, Strabo expressly says that whether they were different populations under the same name, or the same under different ones is uncertain.
That the Euskara is no new tongue may be inferred from the fact of its falling into dialects; which Humboldt limits to three, whilst others extend them to five or six.
a. The Biscayan proper is spoken in the country of the ancient Autrigones and Caristii, and it has been proposed to call it the Autrigonian. It has, less correctly, been called Cantabrian, and this is the name which the national taste best likes; for a descent from the indomitable Cantabrian that so long and so successfully spurned the yoke of Rome, and who transmitted the same spirit and the same independence to the Asturian, is creditable enough to be claimed. Nor is the claim unfounded; since, in all probability, the ancient Cantabria included some of the ancestors of the Euskaldunac.
b. The Guipuscoan is the western Biscayan.
c. The Laburtanian is the Euskarian of France, spoken in the parts about St. Jean de Luz; and which, in the district of Soule, is supposed to fall into a sub-dialect.
The Euskarian language has always been the standing point to those inquirers who have argued backwards, from the existing state of things, towards the reconstruction of the ethnology and philology of antiquity; first and foremost of whom, both in date and importance, is Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose essays on the subject form two of the most classical monographs in comparative philology. The method he employed was much more of a novelty then than now. We may guess what it was beforehand. It was the analysis of local names. In this he was successful. Roots like ast-, ur-, and others, found in the ancient names of Spanish and Portuguese localities, far beyond the present pale of the Euskarian tongue, he referred to the Basque, and found them significant therein; thus uria=town or city, and ast=rock or mountain—whereby Asturias means the mountainous country, and Astures the mountaineers.
His inference was (as might be expected) that the Euskarian was as little a modern and local tongue as the Welsh; indeed, that it was so far from anything of the kind, as to be one of the oldest in Europe, and not only old, but widely-spread also. The whole of the peninsula, France as far as the Garonne and the Rhone, and even portions of Italy, were, according to Humboldt, originally Basque; or, as it is more conveniently called, Iberic or Iberian, from the ancient name of Spain—Iberia.
So that now we talk of the ancient Vascones, Varduli, Autrigones and Caristii as particular divisions of the great Iberic stock, under their ancient names, the Euskaldunac being the same under a modern one; whilst the Basques and Navarrese are Euskaldunac, under French and Spanish designations.
The present Euskaldunacs must be a population of as pure blood as any in Europe, lineal descendants from the Autrigones, Varduli, and Vascones, and closely related to the Asturians. At any rate they are the purest blood in the Peninsula. This we infer from their language, and the mountaineer character of their area. They are the Welsh of Spain.
With the pure Euscaldunac let us now contrast the most mixed portion of the Peninsular population; which is that of the water-system of the Guadalquiver, and the parts immediately south and east of it—Seville, Cordova, Jaen, Grenada, and Murcia, if we take the modern provinces; the country of the Turdetani and Bastitani, if we look to the ancient populations—Bætica, if we adopt the general name of the Romans, Andalusia in modern geography.
The mountain-range between Jaen and Murcia, the Sagra Sierra, was originally the Mons Oros-peda, a fact which I notice, because the element -peda, occurs with a mere difference of dialect in the ancient name of the mountains of Burgos, Idu-beda. So that here, if nowhere else, we have a geographical name common to the northern and southern parts of the peninsula—an Iberic gloss in two distant localities. It was the Iberians of these parts who were the first to receive foreign intermixture, and the last to lose it, the Iberians of the Bætis, or Guadalquiver, favoured above all other nations of the peninsula in soil, in climate, and in situation. Strabo expatiates with enthusiasm almost unbecoming to a geographer, on their wealth, their industry, their commerce, and their civilization; and all this is no more than their physical condition prepares us to expect. Cities to the number of two hundred and upwards, docks, anachyses (or locks), lighthouses, canals, salt works, mines, agriculture, woven articles, fisheries, an alphabet, and a literature attest the civilization of the ancient Turdetanians as known to the writers of the reign of Augustus; at which time, however, the country was so Romanized that the Iberic tongue was already superseded by the Latin throughout the whole level country; Cordova and Seville,—the pre-eminently Roman towns of Spain,—having been founded by picked bodies of Romans and natives. Hence, in respect to its date, the Spanish of Andalusia is the oldest daughter of the Latin.
But the Romans were as little the first intruders who introduced foreign blood and foreign ideas into Southern Spain as they were the last. Their predecessors were the Phœnicians—sometimes direct from Tyre and Sidon, oftener from the Tyrian colony of Carthage. It was through the accounts of the Phœnicians that the earliest notices of Iberia found their way into Greece; it was through the Phœnicians that the Hellenic poets first heard of the columns of Hercules. It was through the Phœnician—Punic or Tyrian, as the case might be—that the mining and commercial industry of Turdetania was developed. Through them, too, probably (but not certainly) came the alphabet. I say probably, because the shape of the letters is Greek or Italian rather than Phœnician. As the Phœnician settlements seem to have been factories rather than colonies, and as their marriages must have been with native women, their influence was moral rather than physical, i.e., they introduced new ideas rather than new blood. Their contact with the Turdetanians may be spread over some seven centuries—from about 900 to 200 B.C.
New ideas, too, rather than new blood was what was introduced by the Romans; the great change which they effected being that of the language from Iberic to Latin. At the same time, it is by no means safe to say that the Turdetanian civilization was wholly of foreign origin—half Roman and half Phœnician. The inland cities could scarcely be the latter. Yet they existed when Rome first began its conquests. So high do I put either the actual civilization of the southern Iberians, or (what is nearly the same thing) the capacity for receiving its elements, that I doubt whether it stands on a lower level than that of Northern Italy itself minus its geographical advantages of contiguity to Greece. Their remote position was a great disadvantage, and so was the comparative smallness of their sea-board, arising from the unindented character of the peninsular coast.
Between the garrisons of Rome and Carthage we may safely assume some intermixture of native African blood—Numidian, Gætulian, or Mauritanian—Amazirgh, Kabail, or Berber. It is safe, too, not exactly to exclude Greek influences from Turdetanian Iberia altogether, but to hold as a general rule that, from the monopolizing character of the Phœnician commerce—especially the Carthaginian branch of it—the Greek and Phœnician influences were in the inverse ratio to each other.
The chief negative fact connected with ancient Bætica is, that none of its geographical localities end in -briga, a remark, of which we shall soon see the import.
The Roman power in Spain was broken by those populations, who gave to Spain the important foreign elements of the fifth century. These are said to be the Alans, the Vandals, the Suevi, and the Goths. Concerning the first of these there is a doubt. The true Alani were a people from the parts between the rivers Volga and Jaik to the north, and the range of Caucasus to the south—people whose nearest neighbours were the Circassians and Russians, or, at any rate, their ancient equivalents: people whose affinities were Asiatic; and whose nearest kinsmen were the Huns, the Avars, the Khazars, and the Turks. Now I do not say that the presence of such a population in Spain, in the first ten years of the fifth century (about A.D. 408) is impossible; perhaps, indeed, it is probable. The Huns, with whom the Alans were allied, were then hanging, like a cloud charged with thunder, over Europe, about to carry carnage and desolation as far westward as the plains of Champagne. And the Alans will help them. So I do not deny that they may have invaded Spain. I remark, however,—as good authorities have done before me—that, except in Spain, the Suevi are almost always in alliance with the Alemanni; a nation with a name so like that of the Alani, as for confusion to be likely. Such confusion, I think, existed here: in other words, I believe that the invaders of Spain were the Suevi and Alemanni—not the Suevi and Alani. If the view be wrong, we must admit an intermixture—inconsiderable, perhaps, in amount—of Turk blood.
The Vandals—for reasons given elsewhere—I believe to have been no Germans at all, but Slavonians under a German leader, the ancestors of the present Serbs of Silesia and Lusatia: since the express statement of Idatius is that they were Vandali Silingi. Now the Silingi can easily be shown to have been the old Silesians. The existence of Slavonic blood in Spain was first indicated by the present writer; and as Andal-usia took its name from the Vandals in question, the local ethnologist may be well employed in seeking for Slavonic elements in a quarter where they have not hitherto been suspected. As the Vandals, too, of Andalusia were the Vandals of Genseric, Gelimir, and the kings of northern Africa, it must be Slavonic rather than German blood, which is not unreasonably supposed to exist amongst some of the mountaineers of Algeria. Whether the Vandals occupied Andalusia to the comparative exclusion of the Goths is uncertain.
The Suevi of Spain must have been but little different from those Burgundian Germans who conquered Germany. They formed part of the same confederacy, and only differed from their allies in proceeding further southwards.
The Goths belonged to a different branch. Their epoch is from A.D. 412 to A.D. 711. As the Gothic empire was an extension from that of southern Gaul, Catalonia may be the province where the Gothic blood is most abundant. Niebuhr considers that they pressed the Suevi before them into Portugal and Asturias.
Two other elements require notice, both early, but one insignificant in amount, and the other obscure and problematical; the Greek and the Keltic.
From Marseilles, Greek colonists founded Emporia on the coast of Catalonia, and a few other places of less importance.
But who were the Keltæ of Spain? the population whose name occurs in the word Celtici and Celtiberi, Keltic Iberians, or Iberian Kelts? Three considerations come in here.
a. First, the external evidence, or the testimony of ancient authors as to the presence of Kelts in Spain and Portugal.
b. Secondly, the internal evidence derived from the remains of language, the presence of certain customs, and physical appearance.
c. The à priori likelihood or unlikelihood of a Kelt-iberic mixture.
The last is considerable.
The evidence that gives us Kelts at all in the Peninsula gives us them for three-fourths of its area; indeed, Andalusia is the only part wherein reasons of some sort or other for their presence, cannot be discovered. We find traces of them in the valleys of the Ebro, the Guadiana, the Tagus, and the Douro, and we find them also on the high central table-lands that form the water-shed. Such being the case, what must be our view of their chronological relations to the Iberi? Are they the older occupants of Spain and Portugal, or the newer? If the newer, the displacement must have been enormous. If the older, whence are we to bring the Iberians? So great are the difficulties of this alternative, that the fact itself requires extraordinary caution before we admit it at all. Let us deal with the evidence in this cautious spirit.
The external evidence is clear and decisive. To go no further than Strabo, we have Kelts in the north, Kelts between the Guadiana and the Douro, and Kelts in the interior.
At the head-waters of the Guadiana, Posidonius places the Keltiberians, in which parts they “increased in numbers, and made the whole of the neighbouring country Keltiberic.” This is the country on each side of the Sierra de Toledo, or New Castile, the very centre of Spain, and, as such, an unlikely place for an immigrant population, whether we look to its distance from the frontier, or to its mountainous aspect. They are carried, at least, as far north as the mountains of Burgos, and to the upper waters of the Douro on one side, and the Ebro on the other. So that Old Castile, with parts of Leon and Aragon, may be considered as Keltiberic. This is the first division.
In the south of Portugal comes the second, i.e., in Alemtejo, or the parts between the Tagus and the Guadiana. Here are the Celtici of the classical writers.
The third section is found in the north of Portugal, and in the neighbourhood of Cape Finisterre. Here Strabo places the Artabri, and close to them Celtici and Turduli of the same nation with those of the south, i.e., those of Alemtejo. His language evidently suggests the idea of a migration. Such is the Keltic area as determined by external evidence, and it cannot be denied that it is very remarkable. It is of considerable magnitude, but very discontinuous and unconnected.
The internal evidence is wholly of one sort, viz., that which we collect from the names of geographical localities. One of the common terminations in the map of ancient Gaul is the word -briga (as in Eburo-briga), which takes the slightly different forms of -briva, and -brica—Baudo-brica, Samaro-briva. Now compounds of -briga are exceedingly common in Spain. They occur in all the parts to which Celtici or Celtiberi are referred, and in a great many more besides. Hence the internal evidence—as far, at least, as the compounds in -briga are concerned—gives us a larger Keltic area (or more Keltiberians) than the testimony of authors; indeed it gives us the whole of the peninsula except Andalusia, a fact which explains the import of a previous remark as to absence of compounds ending in -briga south of the Sierra Morena. It is rare, too, in Catalonia—perhaps non-existent.
Tested, however, by the presence of the form in question, Valentia on the west, and all Portugal (the ancient Lusitania) on the east, were Keltiberic—as may be seen by reference to any map of ancient Spain.
But there are serious objections to the usual inference from this compound. It is nearly the only geographical term of which the form is Keltic. And this is a remarkable instance of isolation. The terminations -durum, -magus, and -dunum, all of which are far commoner in Gaul than even -briga itself, are nowhere to be found. Neither are the Gallic prefixes, such as tre-, nant-, ver-, &c. Hence, it is strange that, if Spain were Keltic, only one Keltic form should have come down to us. Where are the rest? I am inclined to believe that the inference as to such a Spanish name as, e.g., Talo-briga, being Keltic, on the strength of such undoubted Gallic words as Eboro-briga, is no better than the assertion that the Jewish name Samp-son was in the same category with the English names John-son and Thomp-son would be. Such accidental resemblances are by no means uncommon. The termination -dun is as common in Keltic, as the termination -tun is in German. Yet they are wholly independent formations. At the same time I cannot deny that the internal and external evidence partially support each other.
But there is another series of facts which goes further still to invalidate the belief in the existence of Kelts in Spain. It is this. Instead of the Kelts of Iberia having been Kelts in the modern sense of the term, the Kelts of Gallia were Iberians. This is an unfortunate circumstance. Writers, speakers, journalists, and orators, Ribbonmen and Orangemen, who neither know nor care much about the Natural History of Man, talk about the Keltic stock, or the Keltic race, with a boldness and fluency that, except in the case of the antagonist term Anglo-Saxon, we meet with nowhere else. To read some of the dissertations on Irish misgovernment, or Welsh dissent, one might fancy that an American of Pennsylvania was writing about the aboriginal Indians, or the enslaved negroes—so much is there made of race, and so familiar are even the non-ethnological part of the world with the term. Men know this when they know nothing else.
Great, then, is the actual and practical currency and general recognition of the word; so great that its historical truth, and its theoretical propriety are matters of indifference. Be it ever so incorrect, the time for changing it has gone by. Nevertheless, I think (nay, I am sure) that the word is misapplied.
I think, that though used to denominate the tribe and nations allied to the Gauls, it was, originally, no Gallic word—as little native as Welsh is British.
I also think that even the first populations to which it was applied were other than Keltic in the modern sense of the term.
I think, in short, that it was a word belonging to the Iberian language, applied, until the time of Cæsar at least, to Iberic populations.
The name came from the Greeks of the Gulf of Lyons—the Greeks of Massilia, or of Emporia, more probably the former. Now, as there is express evidence that a little to the west of Marseilles the Ligurian and Iberian areas met, the likelihood of the word belonging to the latter language is considerable.
It is increased by the circumstance of two-thirds, if not more, of the Keltic portion of Gaul being Iberian. Posidonius places the centre of the Keltic country in Provence, near the spot where the Roman settlement of Narbo was built: an Iberian locality. The Kelts of Herodotus are in the neighbourhood of the city called Pyrene; a word which carries us as far westward as the Pyrenees, although its meaning is different. As far as they extended beyond the present provinces of Roussillon and Languedoc, they extended westwards; beyond—according to Herodotus—the Pillars of Hercules, and as far as the frontier of the extreme Kynetæ. Aristotle knew the true meaning of the word Pyrene, i.e., that it denoted a range of mountains; and he also called Pyrene “a mountain of Keltica.” By the time of Cæsar, however, a great number of undoubted Gauls were included under the name Celtæ: in other words, the Iberian name for an Iberian population was first adopted by the Greeks as the name for all the inhabitants of south-western Gaul, and it was then extended by the Romans so as to include all the populations of Gallia except the Belgæ and Aquitanians. The word Celtæ also passed for a native name—“ipsorum lingua Celtæ, nostra Galli appellantur.” Upon this Prichard reasonably remarks, that Cæsar would have written more accurately had he stated that the people whom the Greeks called Κἑλται were Galli in the eyes of a Roman.
But the Greek form for Galli is Γἁλ-αται, a form suspiciously like Κἑλτ-αι. I admit that this engenders a difficulty, since it shows the possibility of the two words being the same. At the same time it can be explained. The ατ in Γἁλ-αται is non-radical. It is the sign of the plural number, as it is in Irish at the present moment; whereas the τ in Κελτ-αι is a part of the root.
And now I have given the additional reason for believing that the so-called Kelts of Spain were no Kelts at all in the modern sense of the word, but only Iberians; and I further suggest the likelihood of the word meaning mountaineer, or something like it, in which case the Kelts of South Gaul must be supposed to be (as they are made by Herodotus and Aristotle) the Pyrenean Iberians, the Celtiberi and Celtici being also the Highlanders of the great central range of Spain, of Gallicia, and of Alemtejo. This, however, is only a suggestion.
Perhaps the point is not very important. Whether we look to the amount of their civilization, to their national temper as shown in the defence of their independence, or to the extent to which they contributed to the literature of the Latin language, there are no very striking differences between the Gaul and the Iberian. Personal heroes like Viriathus and Vercingetorix occur on both sides; whilst Gaul resisted Cæsar by instances of endurance behind stone walls scarcely inferior to the display of obstinate valour at Numantia.
The Gothic conquest of Spain was succeeded, in the eighth century, by one of equal, perhaps, greater, importance. The line it took was from south to north; so that its direction was different from that of the Goths. It was also made by a southern population. The Arabs who effected the first invasion under Musa, were the Arabs of an army; i.e., almost wholly males; probably, too, they were pretty pure in blood. Afterwards, however, larger swarms came over from Africa; and it cannot be doubted that, along with these there were females and families of mixed African as well as of pure Arab descent. The areas which were successively appropriated by these invaders are not exactly those that we expect, à priori. Murcia, or the March, was less modified by the conquest than Valencia and other countries northwards. It was held in a sort of imperfect independence by Theodemir, and under the name of Tadmor, into which that of the Gothic king was metamorphosed by the Arabs, long continued to be the most Gothic part of south-eastern Spain.
In contrast to Grenada, and in consonance with what we expect from their geographical position, were the northern provinces of Asturias, Biscay, Navarre, and Galicia—Galicia, in respect to its ethnology, belonging almost as much to Portugal as to Spain. Into Asturias the arms of the Arab conqueror never penetrated: so that the original nationality was preserved in the kingdom of Oviedo, under the successors of Pelagius or Pelayo. Were these brave and independent mountaineers Goths or Romans? or were they original Iberians? And if of mixed blood, in what proportion were the different elements? They seem to have been second in purity of blood to the true and Proper Basques only. They were somewhat more Romanized than the latter, as is shown by their language; but both were equally free of Gothic admixture. This view rests partly on the previous details of their history, and partly on the names of the kings who succeeded Pelayo. They are not Gothic, like Euric, Wallia, or Roderic, nor yet Latin, like Pedro; but truly and properly Spanish (with the exception, perhaps, of Frivila), as Alonzo, Ordonio, Sancho, &c.; Spanish in the same way that Edward and Richard are German, or Arthur and Owen, Keltic. Pacheco, perhaps, is the truest Iberian designation. It occurs in Cæsar, as Paciecus. When the Arabs conquered Spain, their peculiar civilization was but partially developed. It grew up, to a great degree, within Spain itself.
The Arab elements belonged to the same class with the Phœnician, though to a different section of it. So did the Jewish, which were introduced earlier, and, if not of equal amount, were, at least, of longer duration. The Jews brought with them the oldest civilization in the world. But they were important physical influences as well. They came with their families, and, consequently, were less thrown upon the necessities of intermixture than the majority of the Arabs. The intermixture, however, was in both cases considerable. As long as the Arian kings of the Gothic stock held their sway, the Israelite was tolerated and something more. His industry was protected, and his earlier familiarity with letters and the civilizing influences of commerce respected. The prejudices against intermixture were chiefly on his side. Orthodoxy, however, introduced persecution. Some of its earliest enactments forbid Christian wives and Christian mistresses to Jews, a sure proof of the previous prevalence of an opposite custom. In the Mahometan parts of the Peninsula, the toleration was considerable throughout. Lastly must be noticed the great extent to which the pride in his real or supposed purity of blood characterizes the Hidalgo. This would not have been the case if purity of blood were the rule, and an Arab or Jewish cross the exception. The reign of Ferdinand and Isabella was signalized by the double ejection of the Jews from the Peninsula in general, and the Arabs from their last possession, the kingdom of Grenada. Such ejectments are never complete. Each, however, of these was one of remarkable magnitude.
The Normans, who settled on so many of the coasts of southern Europe, made a smaller impression on the Iberian peninsula than elsewhere. Still they must be recognised as an element.
Such is the basis of the Spanish stock, and such the chief superadded elements—Iberic in the first instance: then Phœnician, Greek, Roman, Gothic, Vandal, Alan (?), Jewish, Arab, and Norman, to say nothing about the cases of French and other settlers from the modern kingdoms of Europe. These elements are differently distributed over the several provinces; and at the present moment each has some peculiar characteristics.
The most regular features, and the most purely brunette complexions are found in Andalusia, conjoined with a gay, pleasure-loving disposition; not given to the sterner virtues, but with considerable intellectual capacity, as shown both in art and literature; and, in Andalusia, the foreign elements are at their maximum—chiefly oriental, but partly (in the belief, at least, of the present writer) Slavonic. Yet it is not safe to refer the one to the other. The soil and climate of Andalusia—the favoured valley of the most southern river in Spain—have also their peculiarities.
In Grenada the habits are ruder, and Grenada is chiefly a mountain range.
Murcia[3] has the credit of being the Bœotia of Spain. It has less than its share of Arab, and, perhaps, a considerable amount of Gothic, blood.
Valencia has been unfavourably described; the physiognomy of its population being the most Moorish in Spain, and the temper dangerous. It was from Valencia that the last branch of Arabs was expelled in the reign of Philip III.—the Little Moors or Moriscoes. Orientals as they were, the nobles to whom they were serfs, and whose land they cultivated, could ill afford to lose them. Contrary to what we expect from their stock, they were signalized by steady industry and perseverance in agriculture. The present language of Valencia is only Spanish so far as it is spoken in the Spanish peninsula. It is a distinct tongue from the Castilian; yet not French. It belongs to the Provençal class—called also Limousin.
It is the same with Catalonia; the least Iberic, the least Arab, but, perhaps, the most Roman, and the most Gothic of all the Spanish provinces—Cat-alonia or Goth-land—commercial, manufacturing, and radical, with a political history of its own, and, for a time, an independent line of sovereigns—the Berengarii.
In respect to language, the standard Spanish is that of the Castiles; and it is upon the Castilians that our usual notions of a Spaniard are founded. Decorous, reserved, and unenterprising, the occupant of a misplaced metropolis, and of an arid table-land, which, for the most part, is too much a mountain for agricultural, and too little of one for mining industry, he is a type of the third variety of the Iberic stock—the Andalusian and Catalonian being the other two.
In the fourth, the mountaineer-character, with its usual spirit of independence, rude manners, and hardy mode of life, which attains its height in Navarre and Biscay, is shared in different degrees by the Galicians, Asturians, northern Arragonese, and the Spaniards of Leon; the physical appearance changing from dark to light, and from a regular contour to coarse angular features, with high cheek-bones. In Galicia, a province of hewers of wood and drawers of water, this is most remarkable. In Biscay, the comparative lightness of complexion has engendered the idea of a Norman intermixture.
Though it would be a dangerous overstatement to say that descent, pedigree, blood, or extraction go for nothing, we cannot consider the nature of the Spanish national character in general, as exhibited in the development of its science, art, literature, social institutions, and in its moral and material influence upon the history of the world, without seeing that many of the leading features of the drama that the Spaniards have played upon the theatre of both the Old and New World are referable to the effect of external circumstances—circumstances which, in our inability to work out the details of cause and effect, we must be content to call accidental. Who so likely to be isolated in the character of their literature, and deficient in comprehensiveness of thought, as the nation with the smallest sea-board and the most extreme geographical position in Europe? Who so probable to have spread their language over half America as the same? Who so fit to be good Catholics as the favoured of the Pope, the authorized converters of the heathen Indians, and the people whose national life was a crusade against the Mahometan on their own soil? Who, too, so born to the pride of purity of blood? There is much to account for all this, with which descent has nothing to do, although, perhaps, there is more than the explanation of all this accounts for.
A ballad literature, rising to the level of the humbler epics, and a truly home-grown drama, are the self-evolved, indigenous elements of Spanish literature. Their material influences are to be found in the histories of America, the Indies, the Philippines, Micronesia, Italy, and the Mediterranean Islands.
Portugal is Spain with a difference. More purely Iberic, and less Phœnician, from the first, it was also less Roman, less Arab, and very slightly Gothic. In Africa and India its influence has been greater, in America somewhat less than that of Spain. The extent to which the physical and moral characteristics of the Galicians and Estremadurans are intermediate and transitional, I am unable to state.
* * * *
A refinement upon the doctrine of the Keltæ having been Iberian, and of the Celtiberi having been no Kelts at all, in the usual sense of the term, will be found when we come to the ethnology of Ireland. It consists in the possibility of one or both having been Gaels—Kelts, it is true, but not Kelts in the sense given to the word by the ancients.
FRANCE.—IBERIAN BLOOD IN GAUL AS WELL AS THE SPANISH PENINSULA.—IBERIANS OF GASCONY, ETC.—LIGURIANS.—HOW FAR KELTIC.—BODENCUS.—INTERMIXTURE.—ROMAN, GERMAN, ARAB.—ALSATIA.—LORRAINE.—FRANCHE-COMTÉ.—BURGUNDY, SOUTHERN, WESTERN, AND NORTHERN FRANCE.—CHARACTER OF THE KELTS.—THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE.—BELGIUM.—ITS ELEMENTS.—KELTIC, GERMAN, AND ROMAN.—SWITZERLAND.—HELVETIA.—ROMANCE, FRENCH, AND GERMAN LANGUAGES.
IT is convenient to take the ethnology of France next in order to that of Spain, because we have already seen that, when we examine the earliest populations of the two countries we shall find that the Iberic stock was common to the two. Although I find no Gauls in Iberia, the Iberians in ancient Gaul were numerous; indeed, they occur in Gascony and Bearn at the present moment.
The predominant stock, however, of Gallia, as is well-known, is the Keltic, still existing, along with its ancient language, and other characteristics in Brittany.
The Iberians belonged chiefly, though not wholly and exclusively, to Aquitania. In the reign of Augustus this term denoted a political, in that of Julius Cæsar, an ethnological area. The province reached from the Pyrenees to the Loire; the Aquitania of the true Aquitani from the Pyrenees to the Garonne.
In the present towns of Bazas, Eauze, and Auch, we have the names of the ancient Vas-ates, Elus-ates, and Ausci; besides which, the Soci-ates, the Tarus-ates, the Garumni, the Bigerriones, the Preciani, the Gari-tes, the Sabuz-ates, the Cocos-ates, the Lector-ates, and the Tarbelli occupied the present provinces of Gascony and Bearn in general. It is usual to say that these names are Iberian. This is scarcely the case. The remarkable peculiarity of them is as follows: the termination -at is Gallic, and probably the sign of the plural number, whilst the radical part is not evidently Gallic, and, probably, not Gallic at all; or (changing the expression) whilst the Gallic inflexion is common amongst the old names of Gascony, the Gallic roots (-magus, tre-, con-, &c.) are rare; from which I infer that the geographical nomenclature of south-western France was Iberic in respect to its roots, but Gallic in respect to its form; so that the words in question are Iberic names taken from Gallic informants. Nothing, however, of great importance depends on this.
In the parts about Baignerres there was a Roman colony, that of the Convenæ; partly Gallic, partly Iberic, and partly Legionary.[4]
As were Gascony and Bearn, so were Rousillon and the greater part of Languedoc—Iberic; for the Iberi extended to the Rhone.
Along the frontier of the Iberian area there was certainly intermixture between the Aquitanians and the true Gauls, and there were also Gallic settlements, such as Hebro-magus, within the Iberian area itself. Nevertheless, Southern Gaul was Northern Spain, and Northern Spain Southern Gaul.
Provence and Dauphiné differ from Gascony and Languedoc in having had a Ligurian rather than an Iberian substratum; in having received Roman influences earlier and more largely, in having been the area of the Phocæan colony of Massilia, or Marseilles, in and around which city there must have been a notable tincture of Greek blood.
Who were the Ligurians?
The Phocæan Greeks founded the colony of Marseilles; and it was not long before the parts along the coast, and to some distance inland, became imperfectly known. When Prometheus gives to Hercules the details of his travels westwards, he says that, “You” (Hercules) “shall reach the fearless people of the Ligyes, where, with all your bravery, you shall find no fault with their warlike vigour. It is ordained that you shall leave your arrows behind. But as all the country is soft, you shall be unable to find a stone. Then Zeus shall see you in distress, and pity you, and overshadow the land with a cloud, whence a storm of round stones shall rain down. With these you shall easily smite and pursue the army of the Ligyes.” Such is the gist of a quotation from a writer so early as Æschylus, in his drama of the “Prometheus Unbound,” as given by Strabo.
These Ligyes are the Ligurians, better known as a people of Italy, and as the coastmen of the Gulf of Genoa. Southwards and eastwards they extended as far as the Arno, and westwards to the Rhone; where (as already stated) they came in contact with the Iberians. So that the ancient Ligurians were a population common to both Gaul and Italy, just as the Iberians were common to Gaul and Spain. Herodotus places Marseilles in the country of the Ligyes.
The fact of this tract being known so much earlier than the interior of Gaul, known too to the Greeks who first, and more than others, used the term Kelt, confirms the view of its non-Gallic origin. At any rate, it makes it either Iberian or Ligurian, and, consequently, only so far Keltic (in the modern sense of the term) as the Ligurians were Keltæ.
This is the point now under notice. I think that the Ligurians were Kelts.
In the first place, the name seems to have a meaning in the Keltic tongue; since Prichard suggests that it may have been derived from Llygwyr,[5] which means in Welsh coastman.
In my mind it is a native name also; a point upon which Prichard expresses a doubt, since he writes that, “it does not prove that the people were Kelts, since the designation is one more likely to have been bestowed upon them by a neighbouring tribe than assumed by themselves.” Who, however, could have bestowed it? Scarcely any population of the interior, since it is Greeks from whom we get it, and the coast was the part with which they were chiefly acquainted. Had the name been a late one, and derived from Roman sources, Dr. Prichard’s inference would have been legitimate. As it is, however, we have nothing but Ligurians and Iberians from the Pyrenees to the Arno, and as it cannot be both Iberic and Keltic (in the modern sense of the word), it must, if Keltic, be Ligurian.
Against it lies the evidence of Strabo, who separates the Ligyes from the Kelts as a distinct race; differing, however, but little from the Kelts in their mode of life. Now with this qualification, and with the belief that the Kelts whom he contrasted with the Ligyes were, to a great extent, Iberian, I lay but little stress on the evidence of Strabo.
Against it, also, in the eyes of more than one good writer, is a very questionable etymology; which I will give in full, as a lesson of caution. Pliny says that the river Po in the Ligurian language was called Bodencus, or bottomless. Prichard suggests, in a note, that the true reading may have been Boden-los, and asks whether anybody will venture hence to conjecture that the Ligurians were Germans? Sir Francis Palgrave, taking Prichard’s suggestion as a bonâ fide reading, does this; and that with a great degree of confidence. Yet the termination -nc is found in the country of the Allobroges, or Dauphiné, e.g., Lem-incum, Durot-incum, Vap-incum, and is also Gallic, e.g., Aged-incum. It is British as well—Habita-ncum.
The reasons, then, against the Keltic origin of the Ligurians are thus exceptionable. Yet those in favour of it are weak. One thing, however, they must have been: a. Kelts; b. Iberians; or c. members of a wholly new, and now extinct, stock. I incline to the first of these views rather than the second, and the second rather than the third. At the same time, they were a well-marked variety; otherwise the Romans would not so invariably have separated them from the Gauls of both Gaul and Italy.
The primary population, then, of Gaul (supposing the Ligurians to have been Keltic) was of a twofold character:—
1. Iberic, in Aquitania, and
2. Keltic (in the modern sense of the term) elsewhere—the Keltic falling into three divisions:—
α. The Belgic—
β. The proper Gallic—
γ. The Ligurian (?).
The history of the displacement and intermixture is complex. Along the Ibero-Gallic frontier, or in the parts north of the Garonne, and west of the Rhone, there must have been small and partial quarrels, sufficient to create intermixture, and a gradual change of the boundaries from the earliest times. Perhaps, too, it may be added that the Gauls encroached on the Iberians rather than the Iberians on the Gauls.
Along the valley of the Rhine, or the Germano-Gallic frontier, there was the same mutual encroachment, but to a far greater degree, and the wars, of which the conquest of Ariovistus is a sample, introduced German, and, perhaps Slavonic blood into Gaul in more quarters than one.
At present—
Alsatia contains the least amount of Keltic blood of all the provinces of France, inasmuch as it is German in language, and French in respect to its political relations only. The fifth century is the date of its conquest, and it was by Germans of the High German division from Suabia and Franconia that it was reduced. Before this it was Romanized. What was it before its reduction by Rome? Many at once answer “German,” because its occupants were the Triboci, whom Tacitus calls “haud dubie Germani.” For reasons given elsewhere,[6] I believe that they were Germanized Gauls rather than true Germans.
Lorraine, originally Keltic, and afterwards Romano-Keltic, is less German than Alsatia, but more so than Champagne. Its name, Hlothringen, is German. I cannot, however, say whether the German blood in Lorraine was introduced from the north or from the south; by the High Germans of Alsatia and Franche-Comté, or the Low-Germans of Clovis.
In Franche-Comté the particular descent is from the Sequani, the tribe which, of all others equally far from the German frontier, was most Germanized. For when Cæsar was in Gaul, the Sequani called in the Suevi and Marcomanni of Ariovistus, and gave up one-third of their land as the price of his tyrannical protection. Now the army of Ariovistus was mixed, and there is reason for believing that even Slavonians were to be found in it. At any rate it infused German blood into the Sequani more than into their neighbours. The process, however, of Romanizing went on all the same, until the fifth century, when the invasion that gave their names to the present province and to Burgundy took place. From which time forwards the ethnology of Franche-Comté, or the country of the Franks, is that of—
Burgundy.—Here the Kelts were the Sequani, and the Germans, certain High-Germans of Franconia. Sir James Stephen, in his valuable “Lectures on the History of France,” draws a broad distinction between the German blood introduced by the Burgundians, and the German blood introduced by the Franks of Clovis; exaggerating, however, in my mind, the rudeness of the latter, as well as the cultivation of the former. Speaking of the Germany of Tacitus, he says, that it better suited the author to “pourtray the more striking characteristics of the Teutonic tribes collectively, than to investigate the more minute peculiarities which distinguished them from each other. Yet we cannot doubt that, even in his day, they were far more widely discriminated in fact, than in his delineation of them, as, beyond all controversy, they were so in the age of Clovis.
“Thus, for example, the Burgundians, before their irruption to Gaul, were remarkable for their skill as artizans; and in the poems in which, not long after that event, they were described by Sidonius Apollinaris, we have the best attestation of their resemblance to the kind and simple-hearted German of our own days. Thus also the Gothic people, almost immediately after their settlement in Aquitaine, manifested a singular aptitude for a yet higher civilization. For, if St. Jerome was correctly informed, Ataulph their king seriously projected the substitution of a new Gothic for the old Roman empire; a scheme in which the character of Julius was to be ascribed to Alaric, that of Augustus being reserved for the projector himself. Euric, the successor of Ataulph, filled his court at Toulouse with rhetoricians, poets, and grammarians; and coveted (and not altogether in vain) the applause of the Italian critics for the pure Latinity of his despatches.
“The Franks, on the other hand, were a barbarous people, and their history is in fact a barbaric history. At their entrance into Gaul they were worshippers of Odin, and believed that the gates of the Walhalla rolled back spontaneously on their hinges to admit the warrior who had dyed, with the blood of his enemies, the battle-field on which he had himself fallen. From their settlements on the lower Rhine they had sometimes marched to the defence of the Romano-Gallic province, but more frequently and gladly to the invasion of it. Their appetite for rapine was insatiate, unrestrained, and irresistible. In war they were the prototypes of the Norman pirates of a later age, or of the West Indian buccaneers of more modern times. In peace they were the very counterpart of the North American Indians, as depicted by the early travellers in Canada; a comparison which almost every commentator on Tacitus has instituted and verified.”
Now I have great doubts about the superior civilization of the conquerors of Burgundy, Alsatia, and Franche-Comté; but these arise from a view, perhaps, peculiar to myself, of the nature of the Frank confederacies. I believe the word Frank to have distinguished the Germans who were independent of Rome from those who were in allegiance to the empire, and, consequently, that it might be borne by different divisions of the German stock, and by wholly unconnected alliances. More than this—if it separated the Romanized from the independent Germans, it separated, to a certain extent, the rude from the refined, the Pagan from the Christian. Now, of these two classes, the rude independent Pagans were the more likely conquerors of Burgundy and Franche-Comté; in which case the differences of their civilization is likely to have been inconsiderable. It is true that they may have been Christianized by time—but so were the Salians of Clovis. On the other hand, their contact with the undoubtedly Christian Goths of Dauphiné and Languedoc, had a truly civilizing tendency.
It was the Franks of Franche-Comté, and not the Salians of Clovis, amongst whom we find the dynasty of the Merovings: Ptolemy, at least, places the Μαροὑιγγοι in the country of the Burgundians, anterior to their passage of the Rhine and their conquest of the Gallic provinces beyond it. Hence, the true Meroving was the Burgundian princess Chlotilda, the wife of Clovis, rather than Clovis himself.
In Savoy the foreign intermixture has been but small; the population being, in the more mountainous parts at least, simply Romano-Keltic—and then more Keltic than Roman.
Dauphiné, Provence, Languedoc, and Gascony carry us to the Ligurian and Iberian areas.
Between the second and third Punic wars the Ligyes of Gaul were reduced, rather later than the Ligurians of Italy. They seem from the first to have been a warlike nation. Æschylus, as has been seen, arms them against Hercules; and their brothers in the Apennines defended themselves with valour and obstinacy. The Salyes were their chief tribe. How far they extended inwards is uncertain. It is only safe to say that Provence was Ligurian, and Dauphiné Gallo-Ligurian before it became Romanized: and that the remainder of the ethnological history of the Ligurians of Gaul is nearly the same as that of the Gallic Iberians.
Next to the Spanish peninsula, the southern provinces of France were the most deeply tinctured with Arab influences of any part of Europe.
In the parts between the Loire and Garonne, Poitou, Santonge, Limoges, and Perigord, exhibit, in a modern form, the names of the ancient Pictones, Santones, Lemovici, and Petrocorii, all of which were Gallic, though, perhaps, not so typically Gallic as the Parisii, Carnutes, Turones, and Bituriges of the Isle of France, the Orleannois, Touraine, and Berri. In these parts the admixture of Roman and Keltic blood, has been less disturbed by subsequent admixture of Arabs and Goths than elsewhere; not that even here it is pure. The Franks of the Netherlands, Lorraine, and the Franks of Burgundy and Franche-Comté must have seriously tinctured the blood even in these parts. Champagne, too, may be in the same category.
French Flanders, Artois, and part of Picardy are just more Romano-Keltic and less German than the French provinces of Belgium. Normandy has its peculiar and characteristic Scandinavian elements.
If France, then, be essentially and fundamentally Romano-Keltic, it is the parts of which Orleans is the centre, where the mixture is in the most normal proportions; as is shown by even the names of the provinces. Brittany, Normandy, Flanders, Lorraine, Franche-Comté, Burgundy, Provence, Gascony,—each of these indicates something either more or less Roman and Keltic than the typical and central parts of the middle Loire and Seine. Thus,—
1. Brittany is more Keltic, and consequently less Roman.
2. Normandy, is not only Romano-Keltic, but Scandinavian.
3. Flanders, more or less German.
4. Lorraine, the same.
5. Franche-Comté and Burgundy, Frank and Burgundian, i.e., German.
6. Provence, inordinately Roman; the basis being Ligurian, and the superadded elements Gothic and Arab.
7. Gascony—Roman on an Iberian basis.
It is now time to consider the physical and moral characters of the ancient Kelts. It is just possible that, from the admixture of German and other blood, the average stature of the Italians may have increased; so that the difference between a Gaul and an Italian may have been greater in the time of Cæsar than now. That the stature of the French and Germans has decreased is improbable. Be this, however, as it may, the evidence not only of the second-hand authorities amongst the classics, but of Cæsar himself, is to the effect that the Gauls when compared with the soldiers that were led against them, were taller and stouter. “The generality despise our men for their shortness, being themselves so tall.” Thus writes Cæsar. A good series of measurements from ancient graves, would either confirm or overthrow this and similar testimonies. For my own part, I am dissatisfied with them. The habit of magnifying the thews and sinews of the conquered, is a common habit with conquerors, and Cæsar had every motive for giving their full value to his Gallic conquests great as they really were. Again,—we may easily believe that both the slaves who were bought and sold, and the individual captives who ornamented the triumph were picked men; as also would be those who were “butchered to make a Roman holiday” in the amphitheatres.
Again,—differences of dress and armour have generally a tendency to exaggerate the size of the wearers; and hence it is that the Scotch Highlanders, amongst ourselves, are often considered as larger men than they really are. All who have investigated the debated question as to the stature of the Patagonians, have recognized in the bulky, baggy dress, a serious source of error in all measurements taken by the eye only.
Nevertheless, the external evidence is to the great stature of the ancient Gauls: evidence which the present size of the French slightly invalidates. As far, too, as my knowledge extends, the exhumations of the older skeletons do the same.
As to their hair, whether flaxen, yellow, or red, it was light (ξἁνθος), rather than dark. Livy applies to it the term rutilatæ suggesting that it was reddened rather than simply red, and Diodorus Siculus expressly states that it was so; artificial means being used to heighten the natural hue.
A long list of Keltic gods can be made out, if we allow to the Keltic Pantheon every deity whose name can be found in inscriptions, or whose cultus has been attributed to the Galli. But it is not safe to admit this.
It is by no means certain that even the Galli of northern Italy held a common religion with those of Gaul; and still less is it certain that the numerous tribes like the Scordisci, and others of the Tyrol, Styria, and Carniola, were Gallic; although both Roman writers call them Galli, and Greek, Galatæ. Neither are inscriptions conclusive. I doubt, indeed, whether they be even primâ facie evidence. We find them generally, as may be expected, in the neighbourhood of the towns. Of these many were military posts. Now the cohorts that occupied them were Dacians, Moors, Germans, Spaniards, Pannonians,—anything, in short, but Romans. What then are we to say, when an inscription to such a goddess as Isis is dug up,—as has actually been the case in Britain? Not that Isis was a British divinity, but that the garrison consisted of her worshippers. In the way of detail, however,—
Hesus and Teutates, as Gallic gods, rest on the authority of Lucan. Taranis, whom he also mentions, has a further claim to notice. By supposing him to be the God of Thunder, we find his name in the present Welsh taran.
“Et quibus immitis placatur sanguine diro
Teutates, horrensque feris altaribus Hesus,
Et Taranis Scythicæ non mitior ara Dianæ.”
Belenus rests on the authority of Ausonius; and as he was worshipped in the Italian town of Aquileia, he may fairly be considered as common property to the Galli of Gaul, and the Galli of Italy. At the same time, Tertullian assigns him to the Norici, who were, probably, other than Gauls; whilst his name has a look suspiciously Slavonic, since bel may be the first syllable in bjelibog, the white god.
Ogmius seems to be a true Gallic name, and we learn from Lucian that his attributes were intermediate to those of Hercules and Mercury.
Peninus was, perhaps, the name of a locality rather than a deity; although Livy writes Deus Penninus. The name evidently contains the Keltic word pen, and signifies probably some sacred mountain-top amongst the Pennine Alps.
Andorta was a goddess of victory, and Epona one of horses; the latter belonging to the Gauls of Italy.
All these may fairly be considered Keltic; though the evidence for none of them is conclusive. The names that are supplied by inscriptions—names which, like the previous ones, I take from Zeuss without having examined the details—exhibit a remarkable preponderance of the termination -enn-, or neh-. Thus we have Nehal-ennia, Ruma-nehæ, Vacalli-nehæ, Maviat-inehæ, Gesat-enæ, Etrai-enæ, Aserici-nehæ, and Leher-ennius. I can throw no light on the termination. Two other names ending in -ast, Arbog-ast and Morit-ast, seem Slavonic; and, as such, are probably referable to some garrison.
Dusius has a better claim than any word hitherto mentioned, since it exists in the present word deuce.
It is little, then, that the minute ethnologist can add to the current description of the ancient Druidism, for by that name it is convenient to express the Paganism of Britain, in which Gaul, to a certain degree, shared. The Druid as the priest, and the Bard as the poet—such are the native names in the Gallic religion and literature. That certain deities were analogous to the Roman Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Minerva, is expressly stated, but what names each bore, and how close the parallel ran is unknown. “Deum maxime Mercurium colunt: hujus sunt plurima simulacra, hunc omnium inventorem artium ferunt, hunc viarum atque itinerum ducem, hunc ad quæstus pecuniæ mercaturasque habere vim maximam arbitrantur. Post hunc, Apollinem et Martem et Jovem et Minervam. De his eandem fere quam reliquæ gentes, habent opinionem: Apollinem morbos depellere; Minervam operum atque artificiorum initia transdere; Jovem imperium cœlestium tenere; Martem bella regere.”
Their social constitution was a system of chiefs, retainers, and slaves; nevertheless, the full development of such a form of government is not easily to be reconciled with the existence of towns or cities, and such centres of regular industry as we know the ancient Gauls to have possessed. Whatever it may have been in the Belgic area, there are good reasons for believing it to have been considerably modified in the southern and central parts of Gaul.
The Gauls knew the use of the Greek alphabet, they cultivated land, they built towns. It is impossible, in the face of this, to allow them a capacity for civilization less than that of the Iberians, or even than the Italians themselves, so far as these last were not improved by Greek and Etruscan influences.
That, contrasted with the Germans, they displayed a great mobility of temper, is likely enough. To the literature and political power of Rome, after the reduction of Gaul to a province, they contributed largely—less, perhaps, than the Spaniards who gave to their conquerors Seneca and Lucan as writers, and Trajan and Adrian as rulers, but still largely: for Cornelius Gallus, in the palmy days of Roman literature, and Ausonius in its decline, as well as others, had Gallic blood in their veins.
Their aptitude for war can scarcely be measured by the early Gallic aggressions on the Republic. He is a bold man who would say that the Teutones and Cimbri were Keltic at all, whilst, in respect to the Galli of Brennus, the Insubrians, the Cenomani, and other Gauls of the second Punic war, they were Cisalpine rather than Gallic Kelts. Still, they were Kelts—though Kelts beyond the pale of the Keltic fatherland. The same applies to the Boii.
I must now change the subject to remark that those differences of blood and pedigree, corresponding with (but, by no means, necessarily, creating) a difference of habits and civilization which the previous investigations have afforded, are only good up to the thirteenth century; so that it must not be supposed that those peculiarities (whatever they were), which the Ligurian and Iberian bases, the earlier admixture of Romans, the subsequent influence of the Goths, and the final introduction of Arab and Spanish elements evolved, exist at the present moment. If it were so, the difference between the northern and southern French would be greater than it really is. I do not say whether this is little or much. I only say that, had the original influences and intermixture taken their course, the present French of Languedoc and Provence would show certain characteristics which they have now lost, or, if they retain them, exhibit in a slighter degree. But in the thirteenth century, the north of France was turned against the south. There are good writers who put so high a value on the admixture of Arab and Hispano-Arabic influences as to have persuaded themselves that Provence and part of Gascony were on the high road to Mahometanism when the Albigensian crusade arrested their career. One would willingly believe that there was some reason for one of the most horrible campaigns of history, which might, as far as a murderous fanaticism can be put under the shadow of an excuse, palliate its atrocities. The physical historian, however, looks only to its more material effects; and these were to replace a vast proportion of the French of the southern by the French of the northern type and lineage; for this is the effect of wars of extermination, or (hoping that such have never existed in the full extent of the dire import of the word) of those conquests that either lust or fanaticism teaches to simulate them. I shall quote Sir James Stephen to show that the Albigensian Crusade was of the kind in question. He has given, with painful eloquence, the sickening details of the wars under Simon de Montfort:—
“The church of the Albigenses had been drowned in blood. Those supposed heretics had been swept away from the soil of France. The rest of the Languedocian people had been over-whelmed with calamity, slaughter, and devastation. The estimates transmitted to us of the numbers of the invaders and of the slain, are such as almost surpass belief. We can neither verify nor correct them; but we certainly know, that, during a long succession of years, Languedoc had been invaded by armies more numerous than had ever before been brought together in European warfare since the fall of the Roman empire. We know that these hosts were composed of men inflamed by bigotry, and unrestrained by discipline,—that they had neither military pay nor magazines,—that they provided for all their wants by the sword, living at the expense of the country, and seizing at their pleasure both the harvests of the peasants and the merchandise of the citizens. More than three-fourths of the landed proprietors had been despoiled of their fiefs and castles. In hundreds of villages, every inhabitant had been massacred. There was scarcely a family of which some member had not fallen beneath the sword of De Montfort’s soldiers, or been outraged by their brutality. Since the sack of Rome by the Vandals, the European world had never mourned over a national disaster so wide in its extent, or so fearful in its character.”[7]
From the beginning of the thirteenth century to the present time everything has had a tendency to amalgamate the component ethnological elements of France—to make it a country of one nation, rather than the area of many varieties. Its civil history, however, is the source for our knowledge of all this.
* * * *
The ethnology of Belgium is comparatively simple. Its elements are the same as those of Northern France,—Keltic, German, and Roman; for the analysis (as has perhaps been observed) grows simpler when we passed the Seine. And this was but natural, as the scene receded from the great centre of conquest and the great points of international contact.
In Belgium the Roman element is somewhat less, the occupation being somewhat more imperfect; whilst the Keltic basis is referable to the Belgic variety—a point in which Picardy, French Flanders, Artois, and part of Champagne agree.
In Belgium the German element is more uniform, i.e., it is more exclusively referable to a single division of the German stock. No Goths, no High-German Burgundians are here; but Franks of the Lower Rhine the followers of Clojo and Clovis; Franks from the Ysel or Salian Franks; Franks whose chief locality in the country that they conquered was the parts about Tournay in Hainault; Franks who, if they differed at all from the Franks of Charlemagne, whose line subsequently replaced that of Clovis, did so but slightly; Franks, too, of the Platt-Deutsch division of the German stock, whose nearest representatives are the Dutch of Holland, and the Low-Germans of Cleves, Juliers, and Berg. I believe that whether the kings of these Germans ruled from Tournay or from Aix la-Chapelle, the section to which they belonged was the same, herein differing from those writers who, because Charlemagne was an Austrasian, contrast his descent somewhat strongly with that of Clovis.
To begin, however, with the earliest ethnological history of Belgium, I remark that the same question which presented itself in the case of Alsatia re-appears here. Were the oldest known occupants of the country Gauls, or Germans, or Germanized Gauls? I believe that they were the latter, though not to any great extent; for it must be remembered that Treves, Juliers, and Berg, where the modification was considerable, lie beyond the Belgic frontier. Still, as Tongres (a locality which the express evidence of Tacitus makes German) is in Belgium, and as Cæsar calls the Nervii, Pæmani and others, Germans (by which I understand that they belonged to a Germanic confederacy) the existence of a considerable and early intrusion of the tribes beyond the Rhine must be admitted. So that the Romans, when they reduced Belgium, reduced a country which, like Alsatia, although Gallic, was also Quasi-Germanic.
But they reduced it, and they Romanized it; and as we find the more active emperors coercing the Batavi, Chamavi, and other populations beyond the Rhine, we may reasonably suppose that they Romanized it throughout.
The analogue to the Burgundian conquest of Burgundy and Franche-Comté began in the fourth century, and not with the invasion of Clovis, as is often imagined. Constantius and Julian had to defend the frontier by land, and Carausius the Menapian by sea. And Julian was the last emperor who defended it successfully. At the beginning of the fifth century a Frank chief, not less formidable than Clovis, although less famous, Clojo, invaded Gaul, and penetrated as far as the Somme. Hainault, Brabant, and West Flanders he seems to have permanently reduced; and what Clojo left undone, Clovis completed.
In the reign of Charlemagne, the process of Germanizing went on, but soon after his death it came to a close; so that about four hundred years is the time that must be allowed for the displacement of the Romano-Belgic language of Belgium, i.e., of Antwerp, South Brabant, Limburg, West Flanders, and Hainault; to which may be added French Flanders, Artois, and the northern part of Picardy—for to this extent it seems to have gone when it attained its maximum. And, then, a reaction took place, and the French has encroached ever since. Artois, French Flanders, and Northern Picardy have been wholly recovered in respect to their language to France, and the Belgian provinces partially. Such is the evidence of the Flemish language in Belgium, of the parts wherein it is still spoken, and of the traces of it in as far south as the frontier of Normandy.
But it is not the only native language of Belgium—I say native, because the French as it is spoken at Brussels and the towns is, to all intents and purposes, as foreign a language as English is in Argyle or Inverness. In Namur, Liege, and Luxembourg, the speech is what is called Walloon, the same word as Welsh, and derived from the German root wealh, a foreigner. By this designation the Germans of the Flemish tongue denoted the Romano-Belgic population whose language was akin to the French, and whom a hilly and impracticable country (the forest districts of the Ardennes) had more or less protected from their own arms. Now the Walloon is a form of the Romano-Keltic, so peculiar and independent, that it must be of great antiquity, i.e., as old as the oldest dialect of the French, and no extension of the dialects of Lorraine, or Champagne from which it differs materially. It is also a language which must have been formed on a Keltic basis, a fact which (as stated elsewhere) is a strong argument against the doctrine of the Belgæ of Cæsar and Tacitus having been Germans.
The Walloons, then, are Romano-Keltic; whereas the Flemings are Germans, in speech and in blood—either Romano-Kelts Germanized, or else absolute Germans; for upon the extent to which the Flemish language is a measure of German descent, I venture no opinion. We must remember, however, that as the Franks came from the other side of the Rhine, and from a not very distant locality, the number of females who accompanied them may have been considerable. Still, I think, that intermixture was the rule, and purity of blood the exception.
In stature, the Flemish Belgians are larger men than the French, and, in the country districts, more frequently fair-complexioned. In certain families, too, there is a mixture of Spanish blood.
The Walloons are less bulky than the Flemings, dark-eyed and black-haired.
The particular Germans who reduced the Flemish parts of Belgium, as well as the north-western parts of France, were the Salii of Saal-land on the Ysel in the parts about Zutphen and Deventer. But not alone. The Chamavi of Hamaland were with them; and, probably tribes of Holland and the Lower Rhine besides. Even there they were not altogether indigenous, as will be seen when the ethnology of Holland comes under notice.
In the foregoing account Luxembourg, and Limburg, although politically belonging to Holland, have been considered Belgian.
* * * *
Switzerland, from having a Keltic basis, comes next in order. The ancient Helvetia is at the present moment partly German, partly French, partly Italian, and partly Romance; that is, if we look to its languages and dialects only. Now as the last three tongues are derived from the Roman, we may express the character of the Swiss tongues in more general language, and reduce them to two great classes, the Gothic and the Latin. This, however, will not give us the ethnology of the country, since the blood is far more mixed than the speech. The analysis of this is complex.
In the time of Cæsar the term Helvetia coincided with the modern country of Switzerland sufficiently closely for all practical purposes of general, perhaps for those of minute, ethnology also.
The Helvetii, also, of Cæsar were Kelts; so that the basis of the population is Keltic—although the variety of that stock was probably a very marked one.
The famous Helvetian migration is one of the earliest and greatest facts in the Swiss history. Orgetorix, a Keltic name, is the king. The boundaries, on three sides, are well marked, but not on the fourth. The Jura range separates them from the Sequani of Franche-Comté, the Rhine from the populations of Baden and Wurtemburg (which Cæsar calls German), and the Rhone and the Lake of Geneva from Savoy, which was part of the Roman Provincia. The boundaries in the direction of the Tyrol are undescribed, probably because they were unascertained. An excess of population is the motive for their emigration. It is undertaken with due foresight. Two years beforehand, they buy up all kinds of vehicles and beasts of burden, and sow as much corn as the ground will allow them. Alliances are sought with the neighbouring powers. The Rauraci, Tulingi, Latobriges, and Boii, are asked to burn their towns and join the expedition. The parts about Thoulouse are their object. It is abortive. Cæsar defeats them and breaks it up; the numbers of its component members being afterwards found to be as follows:—
Helvetians, from Switzerland | 263,000 |
Tulingians, from Savoy | 36,000 |
Latobrigians | 14,000 |
Rauraci, from Baden | 23,000 |
Boii, from Bavaria | 33,000 |
Total | 369,000 |
Of these, the number of warriors was 110,000, the rest being old men, women, and children.
But as the historian of these movements is the conqueror of Gaul, we must expect, ere long, the reduction of Helvetia to a Roman province. It takes place as a matter of course. It is Cæsar who effects it; and the process of Romanizing begins. The Roman language, however, I think, extends itself into Switzerland from three points; from Gaul, from Italy, and from the Tyrol. Such, at least, is the inference from the present dialects; since in Tessino and the Valteline we have the Italian; in Geneva and the Valais, the French; and in the Grisons, the Romance.
This last requires notice. If we follow the Rhine from the Lake of Constance, we are carried up into the narrow valley in which it rises, and here the dialect is neither French nor Italian, but a separate substantive tongue which, like them, is derived from the Latin, and accordingly, it is known as the Romance or Rumonsch of the Grisons or Graubünten. The Inn must then be traced upwards in like manner, when in the valley of its head-waters, and the water-shed between it and the Rhine, the Romance will be found again. It is reduced to writing and spoken in several dialects and subdialects; so as to have all the appearance of a language of long standing.
Now this, I imagine, represents the Latin of Rhætia—i.e., of the Tyrol and Vorarlberg—rather than that of Gaul, and it was from the Tyrol and Vorarlberg, conquered in the reign of Augustus by Tiberius and Drusus, that it was introduced.
In few countries reduced by Rome must the blood on the mother’s side have been more aboriginal than in Helvetia, and in few countries is the extent to which the speech is Latin less a measure of the Latinity of the descent.
Until the fifth century Switzerland was Keltic and Latin, even as France was; and then mixture set in, partially. The Germans of Suabia and Franconia, Germans of the High-German division, Germans by whom Alsatia, Bavaria, Baden, Wurtemburg, Burgundy, and Franche-Comté, were Germanized—some perfectly, some partially—extended their conquests to the present cantons of Schwytz, Uri, Unterwalden, and the other cantons of the German language; the populations of which are Keltic, Roman, and German, those of the rest of Switzerland being simply Keltic and Roman.
Switzerland, then, is the third country in which the basis is Keltic, and the superadded elements Roman and German.
ITALY.—LIGURIANS.—ETRUSCANS.—VENETIANS AND LIBURNIANS.—UMBRIANS.—AUSONIANS.—LATINS.—EARLIEST POPULATIONS OF NORTH-EASTERN ITALY.—SOUTH ITALIANS.—ITALIAN ORIGIN OF THE GREEKS.—SICILIANS.—ELEMENTS OF ADMIXTURE.—HERULIAN.—GOTHIC.—LOMBARD.—ARAB.—NORMAN.—ANALYTICAL SKETCH OF THE POPULATION OF MODERN ITALY.
THE only part of Italy of which the ethnology is even moderately simple is the part belonging to Sardinia, or Piedmont. Here the original occupancy was Ligurian. Eporedia, the modern Ivrea, is particularly mentioned as a Ligurian town, and, as its name has generally been considered Keltic, it has supplied one of the arguments in favour of the Ligurians being a branch of that stock. Bodencomagus, too, has already been mentioned. The ancient name of the Upper Po, Eridanus, appears to contain the same root as the name Rhodanus, and, perhaps, as Rhenus; whilst Scingo-magus and Rigo-magus give us further instances of the evidently Keltic termination -magus. The parts south of the Po, which alone constituted the true and proper Liguria in the political sense of the term, were reduced between the second and third Punic wars; the following being Niebuhr’s account of them:—
“The Ligurian war is not only insignificant, in comparison with others, but extremely obscure, on account of our want of an accurate geographical knowledge of the country. It has some resemblance to the present undertakings against the Caucasian tribes. The Apennines are not, indeed, as high as the Caucasus, but they offer the same advantages for their inhabitants to defend themselves. The Ligurians were ultimately annihilated, which is always the unavoidable fate of such nations, when a powerful state is bent upon their destruction. The Ligurian tribes extended in reality as far as the river Rhone; but as the Romans were chiefly concerned in securing the frontiers of Etruria, they made themselves masters only of the territory of Genoa. The wars did not extend beyond the river Varus, or the frontiers of Provence, for the hostilities against the Salyes in the neighbourhood of Massilia belong to a later period. The Ligurian tribes defended themselves and their poverty with such resolute determination, that the Romans, who could not expect any rich spoils, aimed at nothing short of extirpating them, or expelling them from their mountains. The consuls, P. Cornelius Cethegus and M. Bæbius Tamphilus, therefore transplanted 50,000 Ligurians into Samnium, where Frontinus, as late as the second century of our own era, found their descendants under the name of the Cornelian and Bæbian Ligurians. The war was brought to a close before that against Perseus. It was especially for the purpose of exercising control over Gaul that the high road of Flaminius, which went as far as Ariminum, was now continued, under the name of via Flaminia, as far as Placentia, and that the whole country south of the Po was so much filled with colonies, that the Keltic population disappeared.”
But the parts to the north of that river were conquered later, the Salassi of the valley of Aosta in the reign of Augustus.
How far the population which I consider to have been allied to the Ligurian on the one side and the Helvetian on the other, may have extended eastwards, is difficult to say; but the Tyrol was the centre of a new stock. This stock was the Etruscan. It is needless to say that we have now before us one of the vexatœ quœstiones of ethnology. The account of Herodotus is as follows:—
“The Lydians state amongst other things that they colonized Tyrsenia; saying thus concerning it. In the days of Atys, the son of Manes, their king, there was a severe famine over the whole of Lydia. For a while the Lydians bore up; but, afterwards, when it would not cease, they sought for a remedy. One invented one thing, one another; and then were found out dice, astragali, the top, and all other kind of games; chess alone being excepted. But when the evil would not abate, but, on the contrary, pressed all the more, the king having divided the whole body of Lydians into two parts, allotted to the one of them to stay at home, and to the other a departure from the country. With the one that had to stay at home, the king himself remained at the head; with the other his son Tyrsenus. They then went to Smyrna, and having contrived a ship and put therein all that was needful for their voyage, they sailed away in search of a living, until, having passed by many nations, they came to the Ombriki, where they settled cities, and where they remain to this day. Instead of Lydians, they changed their name to that of the king’s son, who led them, and, taking this, were called Tyrseni.”—I. 94.
Few passages of antiquity are better known than this, and the criticism which has been bestowed upon it is proportionate to the difficulty of the question upon which it bears. Niebuhr objected to it on negative grounds; or rather, he affirmed the opinion of Dionysius of Halicarnassus who had done so before him; as Xanthus, a native Lydian, and an historian as well, had said nothing about this Tyrsenian migration. And this objection may be strengthened. The statement that the Etruscans of Tuscany called themselves Tyrseni is inaccurate. The native name was Rasena; and Tyrseni was only what their neighbours called them. Yet, according to the Herodotean account, if one name ought to be more national than another, that name was the one derived from their princely leader—Tyrsenus. The stoppage, too, of the expedition at Smyrna, brings the date of the migration inconveniently low.
Prichard admits that “his (Dionysius’s) arguments weigh heavily against the credibility of this story.” For reasons too lengthy to be given here, I wholly disbelieve the Lydian tradition. On the contrary, I lay what many may consider undue stress upon the account of Livy, who says that “the dominion of the Tuscans was widely extended before the prevalence of the Roman arms; their power was predominant on the two seas which embrace Italy on both sides. Of this the names given to these branches of the Mediterranean afford a proof; for the nations of Italy have given to one of these seas the name of Tuscan, from the common appellation of the people, and to the other that of Adriatic, derived from Adria, a Tuscan colony. The Greeks term them Tyrrhenian and Adriatic. The Etruscans, in either territory, possessed twelve cities. Their first settlements were on this side of the Apennines on the lower sea; they afterwards sent out as many colonies as the original country contained principal towns, and these colonies occupied all the country beyond the Po, as far as the Alps, except the corner belonging to the Veneti. The same people, doubtless, gave origin to some of the Alpine nations, particularly to the Rhæti; who, by the nature of the country which they occupy, have been rendered barbarous, and retain nothing of their ancient character, except their language, and that in a corrupt state.”
The analysis of this extract will verify its importance. The last sentence contains a statement in the way of evidence, and an opinion in the shape of an inference. I admit the former, and demur to the latter. The statement as to the language of the Rhæti being Etruscan, is that of an author whose advantages of time, place, and circumstances were great. As a native of Padua he was as well-placed for knowing how the Rhætian differed from the Latin as a Lowland Scot is for giving evidence to the distinct character of the Gaelic. On the other hand, he was the adviser and reviewer of an antiquarian work of the Emperor Claudius on the very subject of Etruscan history; so that, his testimony on this point, is that of no common author. He speaks to what he had the means of knowing, and he speaks to a cotemporary fact.
But the inference from this similarity of speech is a different matter; one that the modern investigator, with a wider knowledge of the general phenomena of ethnological distribution, may venture to correct. The occupation of a mountain-range by the inhabitants of a plain country is a reversal of the usual order of events. It is far more likely that the mountaineers should have become refined under the influences of a fertile soil, milder climate, and an enlarged commerce, than that the Etruscans of Etruria should have become rude and barbarous. After all, however, the question is only one of degree. It is no opinion of Livy’s that the Rhætian Alps were colonized from the Etrurians of Tuscany. Their occupants must have been derived from the plains at their foot, from the Northern Etrurians of the Venetian territory and Lombardy; and whether these extended a little more or a little less in the direction of the Tyrol is unimportant. The primary fact is, that, according to the only cotemporary evidence existing, the Valley of the Adige was as Etruscan as the Valley of the Arno.
How far the Etrurians south of the Tyrol were indigenous populations, or how far they were intrusive conquerors, is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine. It is difficult, too, to say where they came in contact with the Ligurians, where they first encroached on the Umbrians, and what boundary separated them from the Venetians and Liburnians. Perhaps, we may give them all Lombardy, the western third of the Venetian territory, Parma, Modena, Bologna, and Ferrara, I think that in all these parts they were intrusive conquerors, and, à fortiori, that they were intrusive conquerors in Tuscany. In Ferrara, and the parts due north of the mouth of the Po, they were, for reasons which will appear in the sequel, necessarily so. In Campania they were comparatively recent colonists.
The western third of the Venetian territory may easily have been Etruscan, Rhætian, or Etrusco-Rhætian; the other two-thirds were Liburnian, or Venetian, the country of the Veneti and Liburni. The affinities of these populations, which were closely allied to each other, was with the Illyrians of Dalmatia. In other words, it was only in a political point of view that they were Italians at all. For some of the higher questions of ethnology, however, the Liburni and Veneti are tribes of exceeding importance.
Now, if we are right in supposing the Ligurians to have been Kelts, the earliest historical occupants of Lombardy, Etruscans, and the Liburnians and Venetians members of a distinct stock, we have to go far towards the south before we find the population with which the ideas suggested by the term Italian are connected; before we find a language allied to the Latin, or before we find a civilization and polity akin to that of the Romans. As far as we have gone hitherto, the nations of the Po and Arno are as little Italian as the Basques are Castilian. They have been the nation not out of which, but in spite of which Italy became the country of the Italian language. No immediate affinities have yet been found for Rome.
Language will be the chief test; and of the languages allied to the Latin the most northern were the Umbrian and the Latin itself; the former on the east, the latter on the west coast; the former spoken as far north as the mouth of the Po (in lat. 45°), the latter no further than that of the Tiber (in lat. 42°).
The particular division of those ancient Italian populations of which the language was Umbrian rather than Latin or Oscan, occupied, at the beginning of the historical period, the present districts of Urbino and Perugia, but as there is strong primâ facie evidence of their original area having been much wider, as well as traditions (if not historical records) of the Umbrians having suffered considerable displacement both on the north and west, in the direction of Lombardy, and in the direction of Tuscany, Ferrara, the Romagna, parts of Bologna and Tuscany may be added to the Umbrian area in its oldest form. Southwards, too, it may be carried to the March of Ancona, or the northern part of the Upper Picentine. The ancient Umbrians consisted of separate tribes, of which the one first known to the Romans was that of the Camertes. Yet they were, at the earliest times, the cultivators of the soil, and the builders of cities; and as the Umbrians, in general, passed for the oldest occupants, their capital Ameria, was one of the oldest cities of Italy. Pliny gives the date of its foundation as 381 years before the foundation of Rome.
The Umbrians here meant are the people who used the language of what are known as the Eugubine Inscriptions, so called from the place of their discovery, Gobbio, the ancient Iguvium; which the researches of Grotefend and others have shown to be undeniably akin to the Latin.
From the famous Sabines, in the strict sense of the word, and from the Sabine population in its purest form, the Italians who may best claim a descent are those occupants of that part of the states of the church which lies due north of the Campagna di Roma, and is bounded by the Tiber, the Teverone, the Nera, and the Apennines, the country people of the parts about Narri, Otricoli, and Rieti. The Campagna di Roma is pre-eminently Latin.
For the north-western Neapolitans in the Upper Abruzzo, the descent is from the southern Piceni, the Vestini, the Frentani, the Peligni, the Marsi, and other less important tribes, which it is difficult to distribute, i.e., to say, how far they approached the Umbrian type in the north, or the Samnite, in the centre of Italy. It is difficult, too, to say whether some of them were Latin or Oscan most.
All this is difficult, but, except to the minute ethnologist, unimportant. It is enough to remember that when we reach the ancient Samnium and Campania, the type has changed, at least, in respect to language; for the speech is neither Umbrian nor Latin, though the detail of the differences and agreements between the Samnite and Campanian dialects is difficult.
The language itself is the Oscan, or Opican, spoken at different times as far north as the neighbourhood of Rome, and as far south as Bruttium; where, however, it was not indigenous. It was common to Samnium and Campania, but not to Lucania and Apulia, originally. The general name for the nations that spoke it will be Ausonian.
The Oscan is known to us from inscriptions, and is, at the least, as closely allied as the Umbrian to—
The Latin.—I think the Latin was the language of the more southern of the earliest inhabitants of Etruria; so that at the time of the foundation of Rome, important as it was destined to become afterwards, it was in the position of the Cornish of Cornwall about three centuries ago. It may also be compared with the modern Frisian of Friesland, a tongue spoken at present over a small and unimportant area, but one which was once spread far and wide over northern Germany. If the Welsh were to reconquer England, or the Frisians Germany, the phenomenon which I imagine to have been presented by the history of Rome would be repeated. A people conquered up to a certain point react on their conquerors, vanquish them, and a fourth of the world besides. This opinion is, of course, the result of general ethnological reasoning, rather than the testimony of historians; yet I am not aware of any undoubted fact that it opposes. It stands or falls by the phenomena it explains. The chief of these is the peculiar character of the Latin language.
Is any one prepared to consider it the result of an intermixture of two or more dialects?
Or to limit its original area to a district not twenty miles across?
For myself I do neither one nor the other. I look upon it as a separate and independent mode of speech, even as the Umbrian and the Oscan, and, I cannot think that the Seven Hills of Rome were sufficient to constitute the area of its development. Yet to these it must be limited; for the Etruscan reached below Veii, the Oscan to the neighbourhood of Ardea and Præneste, and the Sabine below Cures; and it must be remembered that, however like the two dialects may have been, the Sabine was not Latin.
The Etruscans of Tuscany were an intrusive and foreign population (if this be not admitted the reasoning on it falls to the ground), and the earlier tribes that they dispersed were the Italians of the Latin type; for assuredly, if such Italians, other than those of Latium, ever existed it is in the parts north of the Tiber that they are to be sought in the first instance; since it is there that the evidence of displacement is strongest. Something earlier than the Etruscans of Etruria must have existed in the Patrimonio di San Pietro and the southern part of Tuscany, and these, I imagine to have been Latins—just as Devonshire was once Cornish, and would have been so again, had the Cornishmen been to England, what the Romans were to Italy.
At the same time some extension southwards and eastwards must be allowed; since tradition, perhaps history, makes both the Sabines and the Volscians more or less intrusive. The main extension, however, of the populations of the Latin type was Etruria.
And now, before we go to Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, we must revert to the parts on the Lower Po, the parts which, at the beginning of the historical period, were occupied by Etruscans, more or less displaced by Gauls—partially, at first, wholly, afterwards; the Gauls themselves being about to be superseded by the Romans.
A statement has already been made to the effect that in Ferrara and the country northwards, the Etruscans were necessarily intruders rather than aboriginal inhabitants. The reasons for this statement were reserved. They will now be given.
The earliest populations of the Lower Po must have come under conditions which, unless we suppose them to have been intermediate to the Umbrians and Liburnians, the ancient Etruscans (unless they were themselves similarly intermediate) did not meet. They must have connected the languages allied to the ancient tongues of Central Italy, with those of ancient Noricum—the former being (as is admitted and generally known) allied to the Latin, the latter (as is assumed for the present, but as will be supported by reasons in the sequel) being Slavonic and allied to the Servian, i.e., just what they are now, only in an older stage.
Now, whoever admits the validity of the valuable philological researches of those scholars, who, by showing the extent to which languages apparently as different as the German, the Greek, the Latin, the Lithuanian, or the Russian, are essentially cognate, have reduced the leading tongues of Europe to a single great class, falling, after the manner of the classes in zoology and botany, into definite divisions and subdivisions—a class which, though somewhat inconveniently denominated Indo-European, is still, as far as it goes, a true and natural group—must see the necessity of bringing the languages thus allied into as close geographical contact as possible; since the divisions to which they, respectively, belong, are the two most allied members of the class in question. For that the Sarmatian and classical tongues are nearer each other than the classical and German, the classical and Keltic, notwithstanding the opinions of several eminent scholars to the contrary, is a safe assertion; perhaps it is also the preponderating opinion.
To connect, therefore, the areas where languages thus allied are spoken, by areas belonging to transitional and intermediate populations is an ethnological necessity; and, however much subsequent changes may have obliterated such areas of connexion, however early those changes may have occurred; however complete they may have been; and however much they may have been followed up by others, the original continuity must, at one time or other, earlier or later, have had an existence.
Unless we admit this, we must suppose that similar names for similar objects, and similar inflections for similar moods, tenses, and cases, have been developed independently of community of origin; a doctrine upheld by few, and one which would require the most transcendental philology to support it; a doctrine which, without condemning as unreasonable, we may fairly say has never much influenced the current doctrine of ethnologists.
Admitting it, however, we must recognise a long series of difficult problems; problems that have so rarely been dealt with as to be considered wholly new and foreign; problems that occur whenever two allied tongues are separated from each other by any form of speech other than intermediate. The languages thus related may be ever so like, or ever so unlike; but as long as they are liker to each other than those which intervene, the problem in question will recur, viz., the reconstruction of the state of things that existed before the original separation, and which is implied by the existing points of similarity.
It occurs in Great Britain. No matter how unlike the Scotch Gaelic and the Welsh may be, they are more like than the English that lies between them.
It occurs, as will soon be seen, in the ethnology of Greece.
It occurs in the question before us; leading to the inference that if both the Keltic of the Cisalpine Gauls, and the Etruscan of Circumpadane Etrurians were less unequivocally Indo-European than the Slavonic of the Norici and the Umbrian of the Umbri, the original occupants of the intervening area must have been neither Gauls nor Etrurians, but one of four things—
1. Members of the class to which the Umbrians belonged—
2. Members of the class to which the Norici belonged—
3. Partly Norici and partly Umbrians—
4. Transitional populations sufficiently different from each to constitute a third class, but sufficiently allied to each to be more Norican or more Umbrian than aught else.
Such is the way in which here, as elsewhere, we must attempt the reconstruction of what may be called areas of original connection.
In the present case, then, north-eastern Italy was originally divided between the true Italians, akin to the Umbri, and the extinct or modified Slavonians of Liburnia and the country of the Veneti.
Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, to which we may now attend, I imagine, in the earliest times, to have been occupied by the ancestors of the Greeks, a doctrine to which I direct the careful consideration of scholars; since it implies a great change in all our preconceived opinions, and not only makes the Hellenes of Greece as foreign to Hellas, as the Anglo-Saxons were once to England, but deduces them from Italy, and that by means of a maritime migration—a maritime migration which implies not only that they were a population foreign to the Greek soil, but that their descendants were a mixed stock; since no mode of migration is less favourable to the purity of the migrant population than a sea-voyage, where space is limited and females are an incumbrance. Such was, undoubtedly, the origin of the Greeks of Asia Minor and the Ægean Islands. Such, I believe, to have been the origin of the Greeks of Peloponnesus and Northern Hellas.
The observations on the relation between the Slavonic and Latin languages have prepared the way to this hypothesis, wherein the necessity of finding a geographical connection between cognate forms of speech recurs.
Now the connection between the Greek and Latin languages is a fact that few have denied, and no one has explained. Unless we derive one from the other, we must refer both to some common source. But the locality of this mother tongue is difficult to fix—so difficult that no satisfactory doctrine concerning it has ever been exhibited. Greece is an eminently small area, and Italy is of no great size; for it must be remembered that the ancient country of the nations whose language was allied to the Latin, and, through the Latin, to the Greek, are not found far north of the Tiber, at the beginning of the truly historical period. The Valley of the Arno was Etruscan; the Valley of the Po, Gallic, Etruscan, and Liburnian; so that the northern boundary of the more western of the two classical languages was the Tiber, and that of the most eastern one the Ambracian Gulf—for farther than this it is not safe to carry Ancient Greece. Perhaps it cannot be carried so far.
Be this, however, as it may, the scholar who recognises the fundamental affinity between the Greek and Latin languages, and at the same time requires either an original geographical continuity or a series of migrations to account for it, has a vast mass of difficulties to deal with: and I cannot think that these have ever been fairly met. The intervening area which lies between the Hellenes and Italians is of no ordinary magnitude. It is not only larger than either Greece or Italy separately, but larger than both put together. It is this if we give it the most favourable conditions imaginable. It is this if we suppose that, on the head of the Adriatic Gulf, there existed in early times a population from which the Italians on one side, and the Greeks on the other, are descended—at the head of the Adriatic Gulf, and no where else.
I limit this hypothetical population to a small area, because, as no trace of its existence can be found, the smaller it is supposed to have been, the more easily its extinction is accounted for; and I place it in a locality equidistant to Greece and Italy, because, by so doing, the amount of its extension is diminished. The more distant we make it, the more improbable that extension becomes; and the larger it is, the more improbable its disappearance. I have put it, then, under the most favourable conditions. Yet, even here, its position is eminently doubtful. The first nations which we meet with in these quarters are the Liburnians; and few have a less claim to be considered either Greek or Italian, or, yet, intermediate to the two.
The bolder doctrine is the assumption of what has been called The Thraco-Pelasgic stock. This maintains that the extinct populations and languages of Thrace, Mœsia, and Pannonia were intermediate to those of the two peninsulas, and that, by a sort of divarication, the western extension of their southern members peopled Italy, and the eastern, Greece. This view has the advantage of being difficult to refute—since it is the current belief that the original languages of the three countries in question are extinct, and that, as nothing is known about them, it is as easy to say that they were the mother tongues of the Greek and Latin as aught else. The assumed displacements, however, are enormous; besides which, the ancient Thracians must have been more Greek than were the ancient Italians; which is unlikely.
But the great difficulty in fixing a locality for this Thraco-Pelasgic, or Helleno-Latin language (call it what we will) lies in a reason which the reader of the first chapter of this book may, perhaps, anticipate. It lies in the existence of the Albanian language; a fact, which I said, on the onset, was one of such importance as to require being treated as a special and separate preliminary to the ethnology of Greece and Italy, as well as on its own merits. Whence came this remarkable tongue, and whence the populations who speak it? For a long time both were considered recent introductions,—introductions from Caucasus, perhaps, or from some other locality equally plausible. But this origin is no longer admitted by any competent investigator; and the modern Skipetar, or Albanians, are now looked upon as the descendants of the ancient Illyrians, and of such Epirots as were not truly Greek. So that the Thraco-Pelasgic hypothesis is materially weakened by the inconvenient locality, and the impracticable antiquity of this nation. So awkwardly does it lie, that it fills up full two-thirds of the area required for the hypothetical tongue in question.
Hence the line of such transitional populations as, by connecting Greece and Italy, account for the ethnological affinities of their respective occupants, must not be a straight one. On the contrary, it must trend round the Albanian country, viâ Macedon, Thrace, Servia, Croatia, and Carniola.
The assumption of a stream of population from Asia Minor across Turkey, Servia, and the parts to the north of the Adriatic is the Thraco-Pelasgian doctrine modified; since it deduces both tongues from a common source.
The assumption of a similar stream across the islands of the Ægean does the same. Yet each is beset with difficulties. If one fact be better supported than another, it is that the Ægean islands and the Asiatic coast were peopled from Greece rather than vice versâ.
So serious, then, are the difficulties involved in the notion of either a continuous Helleno-Italian population originally extended from Greece to Italy but subsequently displaced, or an isolated intermediate locality from which both Hellenes and Italians were given-off as colonies, that I would rather believe that the likeness between the Greek and Latin languages proved nothing more than is proved by the presence of Norman-French words in English (viz., simple intermixture and intercourse) than admit it. I do not ask the reader to go thus far. I only request him to compare the size of the Greek and Italian areas with the size of the parts between them, which are neither one nor the other. This will lead him to the threshold of the difficulties involved in the usual views as to the origin of the Hellenic population within Hellas itself; and, provided that he be willing to examine patiently rather than reject hastily, an apparent paradox, it will also prepare him for a train of reasoning of which the result will be a Greece, or Hellas, as different from the Greece or Hellas of the current historians, as England is different from Britain. By which I mean that, if, by the term Greece we denote the present kingdom of King Otho, irrespective of its population, and with a view only to the portion of the earth’s surface that it constitutes, the Hellenes will come out Greek, just as the Anglo-Saxons are British, i.e., not at all. Instead of this, the true and primitive Greeks will be the analogues of the now extinct or modified Britons of Kent and Northumberland, the Hellenes being those of the Angle, Frisian, and other Germanic conquerors of our island.
But to catch it in its full clearness, the point of view from which the physical history of the Hellenes is to be contemplated, the critic should go somewhat further than this, and attempt his own reconstruction of the state of those European populations which existed when the Greek and Latin languages, with their several points of likeness and difference, were first developed.
Let him try to do this by assuming that the necessary movements and displacements were made by land, and he will find that it must be by ringing changes upon such suppositions as the following—
In each of the first two alternatives there is the displacement of some population earlier than the one—Greek or Italian, as the case may be—which we supposed to have been immigrant.
In the three next there is the same; with the additional difficulty of fixing the point from which the migrations diverged.
In the last there is the enormous displacement requisite to account for the utter absence of any population transitional to the Hellenic and Italian north of the Po on one side, and the Peneus on the other.
But this—as, indeed, are all the others—is reducible to a question of displacement.
Now it is the last four of the previous alternatives that are the most complicated. They are also those to which the current opinions most incline. The term Thraco-Pelasgic indicates this: since it shows that, instead of deriving the Greeks from the Italians, or the Italians from the Greeks, both are deduced from a third population.
Upon this third population we must concentrate our attention; and define our ideas as to its conditions.
If continuous, it must have been of considerable magnitude: and even if isolated, it can scarcely have been very small. Now the greater we make it the more mysterious is its present non-existence.
It must have spoken a language intermediate in character to the Hellenic and Italian. Unless it did this it is of no avail. To be simply like the Greek is not enough; nor yet to be what is called Indo-European. It must be sufficiently transitional in character to act as a link.
It must have been either ancient Albanian, which it cannot have been, ancient Thracian, which it is unlikely to have been, or, some third language winding itself into continuity between the most south-western Thracians and the most north-eastern Illyrians, i.e., populations akin to the Skipetar.
So much for its conditions on the side of Greece. As it approached Italy they must been equally mysterious. Unless we suppose the Liburnians and Venetians to have spoken such a tongue it must have lapped round the area of the northern populations of the Adriatic, so as to be thrown considerably westwards. But, to all appearances, Circumpadane Etruria began where the Veneti and Liburni left off.
The special classical scholar best knows how far the Pelasgi—how far, indeed, any ancient populations—fulfil these conditions. Of course, by assuming an unlimited amount of displacement and migration they can be made to do so. But such assumed displacements may be illegitimately large. Whether they are so or not depends upon the extent to which they are necessary.
Such is a sketch of the difficulties involved in the hypothesis that Greece and Italy were appropriated by similar populations by means of migrations by land.
A little consideration will show that by looking to the sea as the medium of communication we get rid of the gravest of the previous difficulties; though it must be admitted that we get another in the place of it. It may fairly be urged that conquests by sea are less complete and perfect than those by land; so that though they may be admitted as explanatory of settlements on the coast, they are insufficient to account for the reduction of the more inland and mountainous parts of a country. This is an objection as far as it goes: yet it would be hazardous to say that either Greece was more purely Hellenic, or Italy more exclusively Italian, at the beginning of their respective historical areas, than England was Anglo-Saxon in the reign of Alfred. Yet the Anglo-Saxon conquest was maritime.
That, at the very earliest dawn of the historical period, there was a great amount of Greek elements in Southern Italy is universally admitted; the only doubtful point being as to the way of explaining them. They fall into two classes—
1. Those that are accounted for by colonization from Greece to Italy within the historical period.
2. Those that are not so explained.
It is the latter upon which a partial confirmation of the doctrine of the present chapter is based.
a. The Æolus of Homer, who in spite of some difficulties of detail, we must look upon as the eponymus of Æolia, has his residence in the islands off the south coast of Italy; and, it must be remembered, that, except so far as this Æolus is the eponymus he is here considered to be, Homer knows nothing of the Æolians.
b. The Ionian Sea is the sea that washes the coasts of Italy, and not the sea which comes in contact with the shores of Ionian Asia.
c. Old geographical names, significant in the Greek language, are commoner in Southern Italy and Sicily, than in Greece itself; as Phalacrium Promontorium, Nebrodes Mons, Clibanus Mons, Petra, Xiphonia Promontorium, Crotalus Fluvius, &c. Nowhere are these commoner than in the Sicanian country, the part generally considered the most barbarian, but, more probably, the part where the character of the aborigines survived longest—Panormus, Ercta, Bathys Fluvius, Cetaria (probably a fishery), Drepanum, Selinus, Ægithallus. Almost all the islands have names more or less Greek, Strongyle, Phœnicodes, Ericodes, and a great number ending in -usa, as Pithec-usa, &c. Ortygia, is mentioned by Hesiod.
d. The names which, in Greek, end in - -οεις take, in Southern Italy, the older forms in -ntum—as Μαλοεις, Maleventum; Σολοεις, Solventum.
e. The Greeks themselves recognise the existence of colonies planted by their forefathers in Italy long anterior to the beginning of the historical period, e.g., that of Cumæ, seventeen generations before the Trojan war. This may fairly be construed into an admission of their ignorance as to their origin.
f. The epithet Magna in Magna Græcia as applied to Southern Italy, is an adjective which in every other instance of its use, denotes the mother country—the colony being designated by the contrary epithet little.
g. The cultus of the eminently Greek goddess, Demeter, was in the eminently Sikel district of Henna.
h. The recognition of Xuthus, the father of Ion, an eponymus strange to Hellenic Greece, as one of the six sons of Æolus, in the Sicilian genealogies, genealogies which are evidently of independent origin.—“Xuthus was king over the Leontine country which, even now, is called Xuthia; Agathyrnus, of the Agathyrnian country, who built the city called after him, Agathyrnus.”—Diod. Sic. v. 8.
The foregoing facts are unimportant and unsatisfactory if taken by themselves. Neither do they constitute the main argument in favour of the Italian origin of the Greeks. That lies in the necessity of effecting a geographical continuity between the Greek and Latin languages, and the inordinate difficulty of doing so by means of an extension of either of the areas northwards.
The weightiest objection to it is the following. If the southern Italians were so closely allied to the Greeks as the present doctrine makes them, how came the later colonists not to discover the affinity? Surely the settlers at Croton, Sybaris, Thurii, and the towns of Sicily, would not have failed to find out that they had cast their lot amongst cousins and kinsmen of their own stock, if such had actually been the case. They would have found out that the populations with which they came in contact spoke Greek—possibly with solecisms—but still Greek. I reply to this by stating that, if, in (say) the reign of Edward the Confessor, the English descendants of the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of Britain in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries had colonized the coasts of their mother country, they would not, unless they had hit upon a few exceptional localities, have found out, from the evidence of language or manners, that they had revisited the land of their fathers. The language had changed, and the population had been mixed and displaced. The Franks had conquered the tribes originally akin to the Saxons. Now that which the Franks did with the Saxons of Germany, the Lucanians and Bruttians seem to have done with the original Greeks of Italy. Such is the doctrine; such the chief objection to it; and such the answer.
Another arises from the following words:—κὑβιττον, λἑπορις, πατἱνη, κἁτινος, μοἱτον, γἑλυ, and νἑποδες. They are glosses from the Greek writers of Sicily. They are not Greek. They are Latin—cubitus, lepus, patina, catinus, mutuum, gelu, nepotes. I admit this to be weighty. Nevertheless, as the Sicilian dialects are considered to connect the Greek with the Latin, their presence is not conclusive. Besides this, the Sikeli were, probably, more Italian than the Sikani.
There were Epirote (Skipetar) elements in Southern Italy; since several names were common to both sides of the Ionian Sea—Chaones, Molossi, Acheron, Pandosia.
There were Pelasgians (whatever the Pelasgians may have been) also; as is to be inferred from the mention of the slaves of the colonists being so called.
The name by which the south Italian stock, the parent stock of the Hellenes, is best denoted is uncertain. The adjective Œnotrian, from the Œnotri, is suggested.
It is wholly unnecessary to assume the existence of a new stock for the population of ancient Sicily. The south Italians seem to have extended themselves to the island, and when we first find them there, we also find fresh evidence of their Greek character, as has already been shown in the geographical names of the Sikanian area.
At the same time they must have fallen into two or more well-marked varieties; varieties which are easily accounted for. There were the earliest occupants of the island, and there were recent immigrants from Italy, differing from each other as the present Danes of Iceland do from the native Icelanders. For in this way I interpret the difference between the Sik-eli and the Sik-ani, not doubting that both come from the same root; although the authority of Thucydides is against this view.
Thucydides’s account is as follows. In the western part of the island were the Sikani, from the river Sikanus, driven thence by the Iberians. Then came the Sikeli, driven from Italy by the Opiki. Thirdly, there were the Elymi of Eryx and Egesta, who were originally Trojans, but who escaped to Sicily, and settled themselves on the Sikanian frontier, having built the cities of Eryx and Egesta. A few Phocians (also from Troy) joined them, having first gone over to Libya. The Phœnicians held certain settlements on the southern coast; Motye, Soloeis, and Panormus. Lastly, came the Sikeliôts, or Greeks of Sicily, whose colonies were as follows—
a. Naxos from Khalcis in Eubœa; Leontini and Katana from Naxos.—Ionic.
b. Syracuse from Corinth; Acræ, Casmenæ, and Camarina, from Syracuse.
c. Megara from Megara; Trotilus and Selinus from Megara.—Doric.
d. Gela from Rhodes and Crete; Akragas from Gela.—Doric.
e. Zankle from the Campanian Cuma, itself Chalcidic in origin.—Ionic.
A reference to his own text justifies our disbelief in the essential difference between the Sikani and the Sikeli, implied by Thucydides. That such was the case was the opinion of only the historian; whilst, on his own showing, it was not the opinion of the Sicanians themselves. After the Cyclopes and Læstrygones the “Sikani are the first inhabitants. As they say themselves, they are even earlier, being autokhthones; but, in real truth, they are Iberians from the river Sikanus, driven out by the Ligyes; and from them the island as well was named Sikania, being first called Thrinakria.”[8] The Iberic doctrine is evidently an inference from the name of the river; an inference which the incompatible opinion of the Sikanians themselves opposes, and, in my mind, outweighs. But the objections do not end here. The evidence of Diodorus is as follows; i.e., that Philistus supported the Thucydidean view, but that Timæus proved him wrong, and clearly showed that they were Autokhthones. Hence, the testimony that we set against that of Thucydides is the testimony of an equally competent local antiquary, though an inferior general historian: for less influence than this cannot well be attributed to the name of Timæus.
The statement respecting the Phocians is remarkable. It shows the existence of Greeks anterior to the colonial era; Greeks whose presence was inexplicable, except under the idea of a return from a doubtful expedition.
Who the Elymæans really were is uncertain. Assuming that they constituted a variety of the Sicilian population, and asking whence they may best be derived, the answer is Sardinia—Middle Italy, and Mauritania. In this latter case they belong to the original Libyan, Gætulian, Numidian or Mauritanian stock, rather than the Punic. Or they may have been Tuscans. Possibly, Phœnicians direct from Phœnicia, or Canaanites, or Jews.
That true Mauritanians, as opposed to the Phœnicians of Carthage, existed, in at least one Sicilian locality, is a reasonable inference from the name of a town on the eastern coast—Thapsus. This is a word which now only occurs on the northern coast of Africa, but has a meaning in the modern Berber, where thifsah means sand; a likely name for the low coast of the part which Virgil calls Thapsum jacentem.
In the Elymæan country were two rivers, one called Simoïs, and the other Scamander. How they came to be called so is unknown. The effect was to engender the story of the Trojan colony; unless, indeed, we choose to argue that such a phenomenon proves too much, and is evidence in favour of the reality of a Trojan war, and a subsequent dispersion of Trojan colonists. Or they have been Sardinian Tli-enses.
The Carthaginian blood in Sicily was certainly foreign, and the Elymæan was probably so. That of the Sikels was allied to the older Sikanian; perhaps, as the Danish of the Northmen in England was to that of the Anglo-Saxons. Such were the elements that came into the island. But, according to our hypothesis, there was an efflux out of it, to Æolian and Ionian Greece, and, perhaps, to some of those parts of Asia and the Ægean sea-board, which are claimed by the Hellenes as colonies from their own shores. Subsequent to this there went on the contest between the Sikani and Sikeli, even as the struggle between the Danes and Saxons went on in Alfred’s time; whilst Sikeliot Greeks and Phœnicians were making settlements on the coasts, and meditating a contest for the supremacy over both. First from Sicily and Southern Italy to Greece; then from Greece to Sicily and Southern Italy—such is the hypothetic line of migration, analogies to which may be found elsewhere. Sumatra, for instance, and the Malaccan Peninsula are considered to stand in the same relation. The island (Sumatra) is first peopled from the Peninsula, the tribes then occupying it being comparatively rude and savage. But, in the island, civilization increases, just as the South Italians are supposed to advance in their social condition when transplanted to Hellenic soil. Thirdly, the islanders (the Sumatrans), after the development of a powerful kingdom, make settlements on the mother-country (the Peninsula of Malacca), and (an important circumstance in our criticism) partly from the effect of changes upon themselves, and partly from changes in the parent stock, no recognition of the original affinity takes place. The aborigines of Malaya look upon their sovereigns of the sea-coast as strangers, themselves being considered what a Greek would call barbarians. The true affinity is only known to the European ethnologists. So far, then, is the present hypothesis from being deficient in analogies to support it.
The historical period begins with the contest between the Greeks and the Carthaginians as to who should hold in vassalage the Sikeli and Sikani; with a subordinate series of jealousies between the Doric and Ionic branches of the Greeks. Until about 300 B.C., the struggle is, comparatively, uncomplicated. Afterwards, however, the free introduction of mercenaries from Southern Italy, of Opican, Samnite, and Lucanian origin, engenders new elements of admixture. The Carthaginian power attains its height about this time. Then the island becomes the battle-field between the two republics, and from 250 B.C., to 450 A.D. (in round numbers), a period of 700 years, Sicily is a Roman province.
That the legionaries and officials were Roman in their political relations only, is nearly certain. Ethnologically they must have been chiefly South Italian. And the female part must have been native Sicilian. What does this mean—Greek, Carthaginian, Sikanian, or Sikelian? Any one in particular, or a little of each? The paramount fact for this question is the evidence to the existence of Sikeli and Sikani up to the reduction of the island. From then we hear no more of them: not, however, because they are known to have become extinct, but because their relations to Greece have ceased, and the historians who might mention them are wanting. Rome had no contemporary literature; and when it had, the Sicilian was known only as opposed to the Roman; for the writers use the word Siculi, in a general sense, making no distinction between the Sikel, the Sikan, and the Sikeliot. They were treated, however, as Greeks, not as barbarians; and the Latin language was not forced upon them. This is an inference from more than one expression in Cicero’s Oration against Verres, where they are spoken of as Greek.—“Novum est in Siculis, quidem, et in omnibus Græcis monstri simile.”—ii. 11. 65. Again, “Itaque eum non solum patronum istius insulæ sed etiam sotera inscriptum vidi Syracusis.”—Ibid. 63.
If the Romans disturbed the ethnology but little, the question is reduced to the extent to which the Greek colonies either displaced the earlier inhabitants, or effected an intermixture. Of Ducetius, a Sikel king, powerful in the middle of the island, we hear in the times between Gelon and the Athenian invasion; and of other less important chiefs (some with Greek names), we hear until the first Punic war. They are always, however, Sikel. Of the Sikanians, Elymæans, and the so-called Phocian Greeks, little or nothing is said. At the downfall of the Roman Empire, Sicily seems to have been Greek in speech, and Sikelo-Sikanian, strongly crossed with Greek, in blood. Then came the piracies of Genseric and his Vandals; then the invasion of the Goths of Theodoric; then the island is reconquered by Belisarius as a general of the Eastern empire; none of which events were of much ethnological importance. Not so the events of the ninth century. The Arab conquest was a physical as well as a moral influence.
“With a fleet of one hundred ships and an army of seven hundred horse, and ten thousand foot, the Arabs landed at Mazara, but after some partial victories, Syracuse was delivered by the Greeks, and the invaders reduced to the necessity of feeding on the flesh of their own horses; in their turn they were relieved by a powerful reinforcement of their brethren of Andalusia: the largest and western part of the island was gradually reduced, and the commodious harbour of Palermo was chosen for the seat of the naval and military power of the Saracens. Syracuse preserved about fifty years the faith which she had sworn to Christ and to Cæsar. In the last and fatal siege, her citizens displayed some remnant of the spirit which had formerly resisted the powers of Athens and Carthage. They stood above twenty days against the battering-rams and catapultæ, the mines and tortoises of the besiegers; and the place might have been relieved, if the mariners of the imperial fleet had not been detained at Constantinople in building a church to the Virgin Mary. The deacon, Theodosius, with the bishop and clergy, was dragged in chains from the altar to Palermo, cast into a subterranean dungeon, and exposed to the hourly peril of death or apostasy; his pathetic, and not inelegant complaint, may be read as the epitaph of his country. From the Roman conquest to this final calamity, Syracuse, now dwindled to the primitive isle of Ortygia, had insensibly declined; yet the relics were still precious; the plate of the cathedral weighed five thousand pounds of silver; the entire spoil was computed at one million of pieces of gold (about four hundred thousand pounds sterling), and the captives must have out-numbered the seventeen thousand Christians who were transported from the sack of Tauromenium into African servitude. In Sicily, the religion and language of the Greeks were eradicated; and such was the docility of the rising generation, that fifteen thousand boys were circumcised and clothed on the same day with the son of the Fatimite caliph. The Arabian squadrons issued from the harbours of Palermo, Biserta, and Tunis; a hundred and fifty towns of Calabria and Campania were attacked and pillaged; nor could the suburbs of Rome be defended by the name of the Cæsars and apostles. Had the Mahometans been united, Italy must have fallen an easy and glorious accession to the empire of the prophet; but the caliphs of Bagdad had lost their authority in the west; the Aglabites and Fatimites usurped the provinces of Africa; their emirs of Sicily aspired to independence, and the design of conquest and dominion was degraded to a repetition of predatory inroads.”[9]
A.D. 1029, Aversa was founded; a fact common to the history of both Sicily and Southern Italy; from which the rule of the Normans in Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria dates. Its details are those of a romance; the deeds of a small but unscrupulous body of adventurers, too few to impress any new character on the stock with which they came in contact. Still they require mention, though but a handful of men. They were of mixed blood themselves; Scandinavian on the fathers’, French on the mothers’, side; French, too, in speech. They were recruited by heterogeneous accessions from Southern Italy.
“Si vicinorum quis perniciosus ad illos
Confugiebat, eum gratanter
suscipiebant:
Moribus et linguâ quoscunque venire videbant
Informant propriâ, gens efficiatur ut una.”[10]
The beginning of the thirteenth century sees the break-up of the Norman power, and Sicily transferred to the empire; one of the more notable facts of this transfer being the removal of sixty thousand Saracens to Nocera, in the south of Italy. Saracen, however, though it means Mahometan, by no means, necessarily, means Arab. Then we have the dominion of the French, ending with the Sicilian Vespers, and the death of eight thousand of them. Catalonians, Genoese, Modern Greeks, and Albanians (?) complete the list of the elements of intermixture in Sicily; notwithstanding which, and notwithstanding all the previous immigrations, I believe the basis of the stock to be Sikel chiefly, and next to Sikel, Greek.
With continental Italy the elements of admixture, until the time of Odoacer, were due to the barbarian legions in the service of Rome, rather than to the inroads of any barbarian conquerors; since Alaric, with his Visigoths, Radagaisus, with his medley of Slavono-Germans, Genseric with his Vandals, and Attila with his Huns, made but ephemeral impressions. Of the army, however, of Radagaisus, a large proportion was sold as slaves. Odoacer’s conquest was somewhat more permanent; whilst the elements he introduced are uncertain. Reasons, however, may be given for referring the Skiri, at least, and possibly the Heruli and Rugii to the same stock as the Huns and Bulgarians—the Turk, a stock from which few grafts were transplanted to Italy; though a Bulgarian colony in Samnium was existing in the time of the Lombards, and possibly a few other similar offsets besides.
The Gothic conquest, however, was not only permanent, but it was the first of three from the same stock. Themselves, probably, of mixed blood, having taken it up during their various settlements on the Lower and Middle Danube, from the Slavonians and Turks of the countries with which they came in contact, the Ostrogoths, to the amount of not less than two hundred thousand, settled in the most favoured parts of the country, and, dominant as they were amongst a population of serfs, must have played much the same part in Italy as the Normans did in England. And when Italy is recovered by Narses and Belisarius, more than one hundred and fifty years after, they are only ejected from power—not bodily put out of the land.
As has been stated already, they were only the first of three—we may say of four—hordes of invaders, each of which was more or less Germanic; for the Lombard dominion rapidly succeeded the Ostrogoth, and, besides this, partial invasions of Bavarians, Suabians, and Alemanni were, for a time, successful. But the Lombards ruled over all Italy with the exception of the Exarchate of Ravenna, till the conquest by Charlemagne, and over the present kingdom of Naples, under the name of the Duchy of Beneventum, until the Norman Conquest. Of all the Germanic elements, the Lombard is possibly the greatest. But it was no pure strain.
The infusion of Slavonic and Turk blood amongst the followers of Alboin was considerable.
For Calabrian and Apulian Italy the history is nearly the same as that of Sicily.
Now, if after the sketch of these numerous elements of intermixture we ask which part of Italy is most Roman, the answer gives but a small proportion of that illustrious blood. Taking the narrowest view of the question, and distinguishing the Latin area from the Oscan, Umbrian, and Etruscan, the amount is inordinately insignificant—and Rome itself was but a mixture. By generalizing, however, our language, and making Roman identical with Italian, we gain a larger area, coinciding pretty closely, though not exactly, with the States of the Church. This is the least mixed part of Italy, as well as the most Italian; the least mixed because it is south of the pre-eminently German, and north of the pre-eminently Arab area of invasion, and the most Italian, because the original basis was Umbrian, and Sabine rather than Etruscan, Gallic, Ligurian, or Œnotrian.
Piedmont, perhaps, is the next in order of comparative purity; at least, as far as modern intermixture is concerned: the oldest basis being Ligurian.
In Lombardy the elements are Umbrian, Etruscan, Gallic, Roman, Ostrogoth, and Lombard; in the Venetian territory, Umbrian, Etruscan, Gallic, Roman, Ostrogoth, Lombard, and Slavonic (Liburnian); in the kingdom of Naples, Ausonian and Œnotrian, with Greek, Arab, and Norman superadditions.
IMPORTANCE OF CLEARNESS OF IDEA RESPECTING THE IMPORT OF THE WORD “RACE.”—THE PELASGI.—AREA OF HOMERIC GREECE.—ACARNANIA NOT HELLENIC.—THE DORIANS.—EGYPTIAN, SEMITIC, AND OTHER INFLUENCES.—HISTORICAL GREECE.—MACEDONIANS.—GREECE UNDER ROME AND BYZANTIUM.—INROADS OF BARBARIANS.—THE SLAVONIC CONQUEST.—RECENT ELEMENTS OF ADMIXTURE.
IT may safely be said that the difficult question as to the relative influences of the external effects of soil, climate, physical conditions, the admixture of foreign blood, and the introduction of foreign examples on the one side, and those of what is called race on the other, never rises to a greater degree of importance than it does in the ethnology of Ancient Greece. For, in our current language, we consider race to mean certain original differences of organization, faculties, and capacities stamped upon different divisions of the human species from the beginning; innate qualities, as distinguished from mere developments; internal elements of the original material upon which the external agencies of climate, soil, and examples act in the different degrees of its receptivity, as contrasted with the various agencies themselves; and in this current language, many writers, who would shrink from the conclusions to which the term logically leads, unconsciously indulge. I say unconsciously, because it is nearly certain that, out of ten writers who talk about race, and assign to the word a meaning essentially the same as the one just exhibited, nine would be unwilling to deny the unity of our species—unity meaning descent from the same pair. Yet between this and a system of special interpositions the advocate of the effects of race has no alternative. How can there be two original capabilities for the reception of either moral or physical influences, and the evolution of intellectual phenomena out of them, in different members of a family descended from a single pair?
All that can have had a beginning since the beginning of the species itself is the manifestation of the several capacities by outward and appreciable signs. The capacity itself must have existed from the first; and the writer who considers that too great weight is attached to external accidents, and too little to innate qualities, unless he admit either the doctrine of a multiplicity of protoplasts, or extra-natural changes in the faculties of the progenitors of certain favoured nations, when he talks about race, only throws back the evolution of the distinctive characters of the populations he may be considering to some period more or less early. If the remote ancestors of the Greeks and the remote ancestors of the Turks be referable to some common parentage, it is mere verbiage to refer the differences between them to race, as an ultimate and primary cause. It is no cause, but, itself, an effect—an effect of influences immeasurably early in their actions, but still an effect. For it is evident that of race, as it is called, there can be but three causes—original difference of parentage, preternatural changes in the faculties or organization of certain members of one common family, or the operation of the ordinary agencies of climate, nutrition, and ideas.
I neither deny nor assert that any one of these three causes is the true one. I only draw attention to a remarkably common inconsistency. A very little amount of ethnological literature will satisfy any one who makes the search that the number of writers who write about race, and who are, nevertheless, wholly unprepared for either of the first two explanations of its origin, is very great. So that they admit the third, and the third only. If so, why make so much of the distinction?
In the special question before us we are in great danger of overvaluing this undefined element; imagining that intellectual pre-eminence of the highest kind was the original endowment of a section of mankind called Hellenes. That these Hellenes were so favoured is certain, but that they were a race at all is doubtful. Unless the necessity of connecting the Latin and Greek languages in geography as well as in philology have been overvalued, and, along with it, the difficulty of doing so by any simple extension of the two areas, the natural inference from the necessary consequences of a maritime migration follows as a matter of course, viz., the probability of the blood on the mother’s side having been different from that of the father—the one Italian, the other native to the soil. If so, there is an Hellenic language, an Hellenic literature, an Hellenic influence in the world’s history. But there is no Hellenic stock. The tongue belongs to Hellas, and the blood to Italy.
Subject, then, to the correctness of the Italian hypothesis, what was the native stock of Hellas? Pelasgic. What means this? The proper place for this inquiry is the chapter on the ethnology of Turkey, for in two Turkish localities only have any Pelasgi existed within the historical period. A negative statement, however, will find place here. Whatever the Pelasgi were, they were not, at one and the same time, the earliest occupants of Hellas, and a population belonging to the same class with the Hellenes. The reasons which lie against making the Hellenes aboriginal to Greece lie also against any other Hellenoeid population.
The magnitude of the earliest historical Hellenic area is of importance. Let Greece under the leadership of Agamemnon be as truly Hellenic as Kent and Essex were Anglo-Saxon in the reign of Alfred. What does it prove in the way of the occupants being aboriginal? As little as the English character of the counties in question at the time referred to. Four centuries—or even less—of migration may easily have given us all the phenomena that occur; for the area is smaller than the kingdom of Wessex, or Northumberland, and the country but little more impracticable.
Hence, if we sufficiently recognise the smallness of the Hellenic area, no difficulties against the doctrine of an original non-Hellenic population will arise on the score of its magnitude. It was as easily convertible from non-Hellenic to Hellenic as Cumberland and Northumberland have been from British to English.
And that that area was actually very small indeed is evident to any inquirer who will take up the measure of it without any prepossessions in favour of its magnitude, and limit his Hellas to those parts only which can be shown to have been Greek; in order to do which he must draw no undue inferences in favour of the identity of the Hellenic and Phrygian languages from the negative fact of Homer saying nothing about interpreters; build nothing on the ubiquity of the Pelasgi, every one of whose migrations is as unsupported by historical evidence, as the migration of Æneas to Italy, or that of Antenor to Venice; and, lastly, satisfy himself with the “Catalogue of the Ships,” as the earliest geographical notice of ancient Greece. I think that this list is more likely to contain populations which were not Hellenic than to omit any that were; and, with the single exception of the Acarnanians, I imagine that this is the current opinion. The Acarnanians alone of all the Hellenes are said to have taken no part in the Trojan war; and on the strength of their non-intervention we hear of them some nine hundred years afterwards, putting in a claim for the good offices of the Romans, the supposed descendants of those Trojans whom the other Hellenes so cruelly conquered, and the Acarnanians so generously left alone. Yet it by no means follows that because the Acarnanians were Greeks during the Peloponnesian war, they were Greeks in the ninth century B.C., any more than it follows that because the men of Monmouth are English at the present moment they were so during the heptarchy. What should we say to the writer who, in the reign of Queen Victoria, should say that the only people of England who took no part in the wars of the Saxons against the Britons were the Cornishmen? Surely we should accuse him of an anachronism, and suggest the fact of his Cornishmen having been at the time in question, no Saxons at all, but Britons. The same reason applies to the statements concerning the Acarnanians; inasmuch as it is highly probable that they are absent from the Homeric list of Greeks, because they were other than Greek in respect to their nationality. It was only when the Greek frontier extended itself northwards that they became Hellenized. Then, too, it was that the later writers who fancied that they must always have been what they were in their own days, superadded the doctrine of their having been Hellenic to the fact of their non-appearance in the Homeric catalogue. For it must be remembered that, even in the third century B.C.—nay even at the present moment—the Acarnanians are a frontier population, in contact with the non-Hellenic Illyrians of old, and the non-Hellenic Skipetars of the nineteenth century. It must also be remembered that notice of their absence from Troy is nowhere to be found in the Homeric poems. No passage runs to the effect “that the Acarnanians alone took no share in the war under the walls of sacred Ilion, but remained ingloriously at home.” If it were so, the previous hypothesis would be futile.
Upon the whole, I think that Acarnania was in the same category with the nearly opposite island of Corcyra—Greek in the time of the historian, but not Greek in the time of the Homeric poems.
So little, however, depends upon this view of the character of the earliest Acarnanians that the notice of them is rather an episodical piece of detail, than anything affecting the general question of the size of Homeric Greece. It may have contained Acarnania, and still have been small enough for the purposes suggested, i.e., small enough to have been converted from non-Hellenic to Hellenic within a very few centuries.
On the eastern side of Greece the most northern members of the confederation are the Thessalians and Perrhæbi; but whether the latter were Hellenic is uncertain. We may admit them, however, to have been so. Macedon and Thrace were, certainly, non-Hellenic; so much so, that it is only by first peopling them with Pelasgi, and then making the Pelasgi what may be called Hellenoeid—or Greek-like—that the semblance of any close ethnological affinity with the true and undoubted Greeks of the Homeric confederacy can be obtained.
If we leave the continent and turn to the islands, the greater part of the Cyclades and Sporades are in the same predicament with Acarnania. In the “Catalogue of the Ships,” Crete, Rhodes, Syme, Carpathus, Cos, Nisuros, and the Calydnian Islands are alone named.
Such are the reasons for believing that the true and undoubted Hellenic area, was, at the time of the Homeric poems, quite small enough to have received the whole of its population from some other country, and that by means of boats and ships.
The two elements of the Hellenic population in its simplest form, are—1. The native; 2. The Italian; either of which may have been more or less mixed; though the proof of it is impracticable, and the analysis out of the question.
One of the tribes of the ancient Skipetar area was the Hylleis; and one of the Doric heroes was Hyllus. I connect these names, the latter being the eponymus to the former. When the Dorians conquer Peloponnesus, Hyllus assists them. This suggests the likelihood of those immigrants whose first settlements were on the northern side of the Saronic Gulf, and who from thence effected conquests southwards and elsewhere, having done so in alliance with certain members of the Illyrian, Epirote, or Skipetar stock. If so, the Dorian conquests were only partially Hellenic, so that there is, at least, an element of intermixture here.
Others are referable to the eastern coast. Asia Minor, Egypt, and Phœnicia all contributed to mix the Hellenic blood. In respect to Asia Minor we may relegate the account of the descent of Pelops on Peloponnesus to the region of unsatisfactory traditions, and still have a large amount of facts in favour of the infusion of Eastern blood from this quarter being considerable. These lie in the character of the islanders of the Ægean. Whatever else they may have been, they were partially Carian on one side, and partially Greek on the other.
The claims of Egypt to have contributed to the Greek stock have been closely criticized by Colonel Mure. His broad position, that the introduction of foreign settlers is generally followed by visible and definite influences on the language, is carried to, perhaps, an undue extent, since, to take an example from our own history, the effect of the Danes in England is by no means commensurate with their real importance as invaders. Or, perhaps, his views are limited to the criticism of a nation’s literature; in which case a foreign settlement, which gave nothing new to the speech of the people, to their arts, to their records, or to their mythology, would, to the historian of its literature, be no foreign settlement at all. The ethnologist is, to a certain degree, in the same position; but only to a certain degree. At any rate, however, the fact of an Egyptian element in the early Hellenic population is an important point in the ancient commerce of the Mediterranean, even if it be nothing more.
I admit the likelihood sagaciously suggested by Colonel Mure, of the parts between Syria and Egypt being, in reality, Semitic[11] rather than Egyptian, yet passing for Egyptian in the eyes of a Greek; so that much which is really Phœnician, or Jewish, may have been considered as Coptic. Nevertheless, a few fragmentary facts seem to indicate a true introduction of Egyptian ideas and blood.
a. The name of the city Thebæ, common to both Greece and Egypt, is one of these.
b. The reproach cast in the teeth of Achilles in respect to Penthesilea by Thersites, which can only be alluded to here, but which is explained in Herodotus[12] by a reference to Egyptian manners is another.
c. The word Barbaros, which the evidence of Herodotus, combined with the fact of the native name of the Africans immediately to the south of Egypt being Berber at the present moment, induces me to consider it as an absolute Egyptian word.
d. The word Africa is easily explained by supposing that the Egyptians took it from the Afer nations of Abyssinia, and so gave it the Greeks, but it is not explicable by deducing it from a Semitic source.
e. The names Iolchos and Colchis.—How comes Jason, in sailing from a part of Thessaly named Iolchos, to reach a part of Asia with a name all but identical? or, changing the expression, how comes the Colchos of the Black Sea which Jason visits, to have had a name so like that of the birthplace of the hero who visits it? These things, however little they may be set down to the chapter of accidents, are rarely accidental. Yet they cannot be connected with each other. The evidence, however, of Herodotus to the existence of Egyptian customs in Colchis (evidence which, although it will not prove the identity of the Georgian stock with the Egyptian, suggests the idea of a partial settlement) supplies an explanation. Both Colchos and Iolchos may have been Egyptian.
Farther remarks upon the assumption that the Phœnicians only (and not the Egyptians) were a maritime people, will occur in the ethnology of Crete.
The influences from Syria and Palestine were either Phœnician or Jewish, and by no means exclusively Phœnician. The selling of the sons and daughters of Judah into captivity beyond the sea, is a fact attested by Isaiah. Neither do I think that the eponymus of the Argive Danai was other than that of the Israelite tribe of Dan; only we are so used to confine ourselves to the soil of Palestine in our consideration of the history of the Israelites, that we treat them as if they were adscripti glebœ, and ignore the share they may have taken in the ordinary history of the world. Like priests of great sanctity, they are known in the holy places only—yet the seaports between Tyre and Ascalon, of Dan, Ephraim, and Asher, must have followed the history of seaports in general, and not have stood on the coast for nothing. What a light would be thrown on the origin of the name Pelop-o-nesus, and the history of the Pelop-id family, if a bonâ fide nation of Pelopes, with unequivocal affinities, and cotemporary annals, had existed on the coast of Asia! Who would have hesitated to connect the two? Yet with the Danai and the tribe of Dan this is the case, and no one connects them.
In these remarks I by no means say that the resemblance is not accidental; although my opinion is against it being so. I only say that a conclusion which would have been suggested if the tribe of Dan had been Gentiles has been neglected because they were Jews.
That the alphabet and the weights and measures of Greece are Phœnician is likely enough; indeed, from the extent to which the habit of circumcision was strange to the Hellenes, the evidence is in favour of the coasts of Phœnicia, and the Philistine country having supplied a larger immigration than those of the Holy Land. In respect to the infusion itself of Semitic blood, whatever may have been the details of its origin, it was considerable; and has generally been admitted to have been so.
The absolute admixture of Thracian and Phrygian blood on the soil of Hellas, anterior to the Macedonian conquest, is a complex question.
If the Pelasgi belonged to either of these families, it was, of course, exceedingly great. But the ethnological position of the Pelasgi has yet to be considered. Even if they did not, an important question still stands over; since the influence of the Thracian bards and the Phrygian musicians, however much it has been either wholly or partially doubted by late writers, was admitted by the ancient Greeks themselves. Then there is the Trojan war, an event, which, however fabulous in its details, has some basis in fact. Lastly, there is the belief at the beginning of the historical period of the existence of Thracians in Bœotia. All, however, upon these points that is indicated at present is the caution against excluding Thracian blood from Hellas on the mere strength of its barbaric character. It is also added that, until the ethnology of Thrace has been dealt with, the evidence in favour of the Italian origin of the Greek language is incomplete.
The extent of the Hellenic area at the date of the Homeric “Catalogue of Ships,” has been given. The majority of the Ægean islands were, then, other than Greek. On the coasts, however, of Asia Minor portions of what was afterwards Ionia had been colonized. Teos, for instance, and Smyrna are mentioned by name; on the other hand, the division of the colonized portions into Æolia, Ionia, and Doris is unnoticed—probably it was unknown and non-existent. There are Dorians, however, in Crete. The Hellenes are simply a population of Thessaly, the Pelasgi allied to the Trojans, and circumscribed in area. Danaoi, Argeoi, and Achaioi are the nearest approaches to an equivalent to the subsequent term Hellenes.
From the Homeric age until the approach of the Persian war, our notices of the Hellenes are so nearly limited to the Greeks of Asia, that the state of Thessaly, Bœotia, Attica, and the Peloponnesus—European and Continental Greece—is obscure; Athens, however, and Sparta are the parts that then command notice; not Miletus, Smyrna, or Lesbos. Hellas, too, as a collective name, has been developed. On the coast of Asia there is an Æolis, a Doris, and an Ionia, all of which the Hellenes look upon as settlements from corresponding parts of Greece, and there is division of the Hellenes themselves, of considerable political importance, into two classes—the Dorian and Ionian. These differences between their own age and the Homeric, the great historians of the Golden Age of Greek literature explained as they best could. Are we bound to admit their explanation? Not for the Pelasgi, because we can get no definite doctrine at all concerning them. Nor yet, in my mind, for the Doric, Æolic, and Ionic migrations in their details. I cannot believe that the Ionic dialect ever came out of Greece; holding, that nothing but a most undue deference to authority and opinion can deduce it directly from any older form of the Attic. And this is but one objection out of many. Indeed I submit to the reader’s consideration the doctrine that the differences expressed by the terms in question, are best explained and accounted for by supposing, either—
1. A difference between the original Italian populations; or—
2. A difference in the elements which were supplied in Greece itself.
Thus—admixture and alliance with the original population of Thessaly and South Macedon, rather than with that of Epirus may have determined the Æolian character; admixture and alliance with the South Epirotes rather than the Thessalians, the Doric; Semitic elements the Ionic. In the first and last instances, there may also have been a different starting-point from Italy; the Ionians being derived from the coast that gave its name to the Ionian Sea, the Æolians from the district to which Æolus was the eponymus.
That such results as these, wearing, perhaps, the garb of paradoxes, are in strong contrast to the recognized doctrines of the best Greek historians is undoubted. No reader, however, should dismiss them until he has satisfied himself that he has discussed the question ethnologically as well as historically; until he has clearly seen the extent whereto the reasoning which the palæontological geologist applies to the antiquities of the earth’s crust (reasoning wholly independent of historical testimony) is applicable to the archæology of the human species also; and (lastly and most especially) until having fully appreciated the necessity of making the geographical and philological connections of the Latin and Greek languages coincide, he has experienced the difficulty of doing so in the face of the phenomena presented by the present distribution of the Skipetar, Dalmatian, Croatian, and other interjacent populations.
There is, then, a Greek language, a Greek literature, a Greek influence in literature; all beyond doubt. But there is no equally undoubted Greek stock. As far as there is such an entity, the speech is in Hellas, and the blood in Italy.
Up to a certain time the Hellenic influence has a northern direction, and acts upon certain populations originally barbarous, so as imperfectly to Hellenize them. Such is the case with Ætolia and Macedon. Afterwards, however, the direction of these influences changes, and Ætolia and Macedon contribute to dis-Hellenize (if so hybrid a word may be allowed) Greece. Before they do this, however, they have been taken out of the category of barbarism; just as would be the case if Anglo-Saxon England were reconquered by the half-Anglicized Ireland of the nineteenth century, and just as would not have been the case had it been conquered by the Ireland of Brian Ború. Rome, too, respected the land that she had reduced; so that the physical history of Greece remains but slightly altered until the period of the Gothic, Hun, and Slavonic invasions. And even Alaric but ravaged the soil and destroyed life. We nowhere find proofs of any introduction of Gothic blood. Nor yet of Hun. It is the Slavonic stock that has given Greece its greatest foreign element.
Why is it that when we compare a map of Modern with one of Ancient Greece, such a small proportion of the old classical names, either modified or unmodified in form, can be found? Such is, undoubtedly, the case. Yet subject to Turkey as Greece was until the present century, the majority of the new names is not Turkish. On the contrary, they are chiefly Slavonic. The language of the later Byzantine writers explains this.[13]
As early as the last quarter of the sixth century (A.D. 582), the movements set in towards Greece; Thrace and Macedon being overrun by Slavonians. The details here, however, are obscure, and there is an occasional confusion of the Slaves with the Avars. The latter nation, however, seems to have made no notable settlement in Southern Greece at least. In the latter half of the seventh century, Thessaly, Epirus, several of the islands, and parts of Asia Minor were overrun. In the ninth, Macedon is called Slavonia (Σκλαβἱνια). In the eleventh, Athens is sacked, and the inhabitants driven to take refuge in the isle of Salamis. Under Constantine Porphyrogeneta, the presence of an Hellenic population is an exception. “In Macedon,” he writes, “the Scythians dwell, instead of the Macedonians.” Again, “the whole country is Slavonized.”
But the most remarkable passage is the following, which shows that a Slavonic population is so far the rule that where an approach to the ancient population is found it is dealt with as a remarkable phenomenon; and that by a Greek writer:—“It must be known that the inhabitants of the settlement (κἁστρον) Maina, are not of the race of the aforesaid Slaves, but of the old Romans, and even till the present time, they are called by their neighbours Hellenes, from having been originally Pagans and idolatrers like the old Hellenes.”—De Adm. Imp. I. 50.
Latin writers, equally with the Greek, considered Greece to be Slavonic:—“Inde (i.e., Sicilia) navigantes venerunt ultra mare Adrium ad urbem Manafasiam in Sclavinica terra.”—From a Journal of St. Willibald, the writer of which, by Manafasia, means Napoli di Malvasia in the Morea.
More than this. The details of some of these Slavonic populations are given; so that we know that there were Ezeritæ and Milengi in the Morea, with Dragovitæ, Sagudatæ, Velegezetæ, Verzetæ, and others in Northern Greece.
In diminished numbers, the representatives of the old Laconians exist at the present time. A.D. 1573, they had fourteen, they have now but three, villages—Prasto, or the ancient Prasiæ, Kastanitza, and Silina. With the exception of their dialect, the Romaic of modern Hellas is said to be spoken with considerable uniformity over the whole of Greece.
Without investigating the difficult question as to the proportion of Slavonic elements, it may fairly be said that Ancient Greece is the area of a greatly, and Modern Greece that of an inordinately, mixed stock. To this mixture, Italians, Albanians, and other populations of modern Europe have added.
RUSSIAN POPULATIONS, SARMATIAN AND TURANIAN.—SAMOEIDS TURANIAN.—UGRIANS.—LAPPS.—KWAINS.—ESTHONIANS.—LIEFS.—PERMIANS.—SIRANIANS.—VOTIAKS.—TSHEREMISS, TSHUVATSH, MORDUIN.—LITHUANIANS.—MALORUSSIANS AND MUSCOVITES.—THEIR RECENT INTRODUCTION.—THE SKOLOTI.—EARLY DISPLACEMENTS.—UGRIAN GLOSSES.—INDIAN AFFINITIES OF THE LITHUANIC—RUSSIAN POLAND.—ANALYTICAL VIEW OF THE PRESENT POPULATIONS OF RUSSIA.—ARKHANGEL.—FINLAND.—ESTHONIA.—LIVONIA.—PERM.—SIMBIRSK, PENZA.—LITHUANIA.—VOLHYNIA.—KHARKHOV.—KOSAKS.—KHERSON.—TAURIDA.
WITHOUT asking too minutely what are the real boundaries of Europe on its eastern side, we shall find it convenient to carry them as far as the Volga and the Ural Mountains; by doing which we include the Government of the Don Kosaks, Astrakan, Orenburg, Perm, Vologda, and the whole of Arkhangel. This is being inordinately liberal; but it is as well to be so, because three divisions of the population of European Russia are common to the two continents; and hence the history of more than one of the areas under consideration will be incomplete unless we trace its occupants to their original home on the other side of the Ural Mountains. One of these areas is the important country of Hungary; so far, at least, as it is possessed by the Asiatic Majiars.
The great primary divisions of the human species to which the population of European Russia is referable, are only two in number; but then each of them is a class of great extent and generality; falling into divisions and subdivisions. These are the Sarmatian and the Turanian; Sarmatian meaning the Slavonian and Lithuanian families collectively, and Turanian the Ugrian and Turk. A few months ago a third class would have been requisite, the Samoeid; in order to include the occupants of the Valley of the Lower Petshora and the coasts of the Arctic Sea, in the eastern parts of the government of Arkhangel. But it has been shown by Gabelentz, from an analysis of the Samoeid language that it belongs to the same class with the Fin, Lapp, Permian, Siranian, Votiak, and other Ugrian tongues.
The present distribution of the Ugrian populations is not only a point of importance for its own sake, but is an indispensable preliminary for the inquiry into the earlier ethnology of Russia.
The Lapp branch of the Ugrian stock is common to Russia and Scandinavia, so that it will be noticed again when Norway and Sweden come under consideration. It is chiefly in their dialect and creed that the two divisions differ; the imperfect Christianity of the Russian Lapps being that of the Greek Church, and their speech, although, I believe, intelligible to a Norwegian Lapp, being stamped with several well-marked peculiarities. It is the structure of their language that shows them to belong to the same stock as the Kwains of Finland, the difference of their complexion and stature being considerable; for the Lapp is dark-haired, dark-eyed, swarthy-skinned, under-sized, and weak-built, as is the Samoeid also. The Lapp chiefly occupies the country to the west, the Samoeid that to the east of the White Sea.
Finland is the country of a people whom it is best to call Kwains; since Kwain is the native name, and Fin is a term which, from being often applied to the Lapps of Finmark, creates confusion. If this designation be too strange, Finlander should be strictly adhered to. Viborg and Olonetz are parts of the Kwain area, with but little variation on the part of their occupants. St. Petersburg was a part of Finland until the time of Peter the Great, and Esthonia is Ugrian at the present time. No new inhabitants of Esthonia, but, on the contrary, its oldest occupants, the Rahwas, closely allied to the proper Finlanders of Finland, form the third section of the great Ugrian stock. Livonia, or Lief-land, takes its name from an Ugrian tribe, the Liefs, a tribe which from being pressed upon by the Lithuanians of Courland, is nearly extinct as a separate substantive population.
In Courland the most western Ugrians came in contact with the Lithuanians; not, as is reasonably believed, exactly on the banks of the Dwina, but within the Province; in other words, the ancient Ugrians of these parts extended over the whole of Livonia, and also a little beyond it. Courland, however, is, upon the whole, essentially a Lithuanic area.
In Vologda and Perm, two closely allied members of a fresh branch of Ugrians present themselves, the Siranians and the Permians; the latter greatly reduced and Russianized. Perm is bounded by the Ural Mountains, along the ridge of which are the Voguls, and, east of the Voguls, the Ostiaks of the Obi. But as these belong to Asia, it is sufficient to say that they are Ugrian. The Votiaks take their name from the river Viatka, as does the government they inhabit.
Kazan, Novgorod, Simbirsk, and Saratov, like Viatka and Perm, are truly Ugrian areas, though the intrusion of both Turk and Russian elements has left the original populations in a fragmentary state. They are represented, however, by the Tsheremiss, the Tshuvatsh and the Morduin; the Tshuvatsh being a problematical population from the extent to which their language presents a mixture of Turk elements, and the Morduins falling into three divisions—the Mokshad, the Ersad, and the Karatai. The absolute and undoubted area, then, of the Ugrians of Russia, as it exists at the present moment, notwithstanding encroachments from both the Turks of the east, and the Russians of the south and west, reaches as far south as the government of Saratov.
The present distribution of the Lithuanian populations, is second only in importance to that of the Ugrians. Livonia is the most convenient starting-point. Here it is spoken at present; though not aboriginal to the province. The Polish, German, and Russian languages have encroached on the Lithuanian, the Lithuanian on the Ugrian. It is the Lett branch of the Lithuanian which is spoken by the Letts of Livonia (Liefland) but not by the Liefs. The same is the case in Courland. East Prussia lies beyond the Russian empire, but it is not unnecessary to state that, as late as the sixteenth century, a Lithuanian tongue was spoken there. Vilna, Grodno, and Vitepsk are the proper Lithuanian provinces. There, the original proper Lithuanic tongue still survives; uncultivated, and day by day suffering from the encroachment of the Russian, but, withal, in the eyes of the ethnologist, the most important language in Europe.
The Tartar provinces come next, or, to speak more correctly, the Turk. Tartar, however, is the usual term, and as Tartary is the recognised name of the country to the east of the Caspian, it is not likely to be got rid of; nor yet to be changed into the more correct form Tahtah. The stock, however, is that to which the Ottoman Turks of Turkey, along with numerous other powerful and important populations, belong. Kasan, Oremberg, and Astrakhan are the chief Turk provinces. A portion, too, of New Russia is Turk. The date of their introduction is the thirteenth century; the empire to which they belonged being that of the successors of Zengis Khan.
The peculiarities of the distribution of the Turks of Russia is explained by their history. Of Southern Russia, as well as of the south-eastern provinces, they were once the exclusive masters. This makes the Russian population of Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, the Don Kosak country, and the greater part of Taurida, of recent origin; indeed, it is not only recent but mixed, and it is called New Russian.
Podolia, Kiev, Pultava, Kharkhov, are what is called Malorussian, or Little Russian. The dialect differs notably from that of the Muscovite of the central governments, and has its affinities in a different direction, since it very closely resembles the Russniak of Gallicia. And in Gallicia it probably originated. At the same time the three dialects, the Russniak, the Maloruss, and the Muscovite (or Great Russian) are mutually intelligible. Between these two branches of the Russian family a strong national antipathy exists.
In Volhynia the dialect is the White Russian, and so it is in those parts of Lithuania where the Lithuanian is out of use.
The true and proper Russian of Great Russia, or Muscovy, the language of the capitals, and the language which the conquests of Russia have extended over all Northern Asia, and even into North-western America, circumscribed, as it has been shown to be, by the languages and dialects which have just been enumerated, is still spoken over a vast area—over all the central provinces of Russia, as well as on the Baltic and the Euxine, at St. Petersburg and at Odessa. It is generally, too, the language of the towns. But, for a language of so vast an area, it falls into a remarkably small number of dialects. In Olonetz it is mixed with the Fin, since the Fin is the original language of that government; and, in Vladimir, the Suzdal dialect exhibits certain peculiarities; but, with these, and, perhaps, a few other exceptions, the uniformity is complete.
This is primâ facie evidence of its introduction being recent; a fact which the whole history of ancient Russia confirms; indeed, it is highly probable that no truly Slavonic nation (not even the Malorussians) occupied any portion of their present possessions anterior to the fourth century of the Christian era. If so, how was the area first filled? By the Lithuanians and the Ugrians; by the Lithuanians extending from the west eastwards, and by the Ugrians extending from the east westwards. By this hypothesis the two populations met in some of the central provinces, though it is difficult to fix the absolute points of contact.
Nor were the Slavonians even the first invaders who disturbed this distribution; since Turk populations different from and earlier than the Turks of the thirteenth century were settled in Southern Russia in the fifth century B.C., i.e., at the very beginning of the historical period. Neither do I press the absolute exclusion of stocks other than the Lithuanian and the Ugrian so strongly as to deny the likelihood of the aborigines of the Crimea and some of the neighbouring districts having been members of the same stock as the Circassians and the other tribes of Caucasus. Little, however, depends on this.
Upon the early exclusion of the Slavonians a great deal depends; a great deal affecting not only the ethnology of Russia itself, but that of the whole area, real or imaginary, of the Slavonic stock; that of the parts west of the Elbe, that of Bohemia and Dalmatia, that of Wallachia and Hungary, that of Northern Greece, that of North-eastern Italy, that of even the Tyrol, Bavaria, and Switzerland. And the original extent of the Lithuanic area is more important still. Armenian, Persian, and Indian archæology are involved in it. It is not difficult to see how this happens. There are vast tracts of country along the Elbe, the Oder, the Vistula, and the Danube that good authorities deny to have been originally Slavonic. “They were German,” it is said, “or if not German, Keltic, or, perhaps, they belonged to some extinct stock.” “If so,” it is reasonably asked, “whence came the Slavonians, and where is the cradle of so vast a family?”
A common answer is “Russia.” But what if Russia be Ugrian, or if not Ugrian, Lithuanic? Surely the question is important.
Then as to the Lithuanians. They and the Slavonians are branches of the same Sarmatian family; so, of course, their languages, though different, are allied. But next to the Slavonic what tongues are nearest the Lithuanic? Not the speech of the Fin, the German, or the Kelt, though these are the nearest in geography. The Latin is liker than any of these; but the likest of all is the ancient sacred language of India—the Sanskrit of the Vedas, Puranas, the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana. And what tongue is the nearest to the Sanskrit? Not those of Tibet and Armenia, not even those of Southern India. Its nearest parallel is the obscure and almost unlettered languages of Grodno, Wilna, Vitepsk, Courland, Livonia, and East Prussia. There is a difficult problem here; a problem which every fact which brings the Lithuanic and Sanskrit areas nearer to each other, advances towards its solution.
One of the presumptions in favour of the view in question has been noticed, viz., the uniformity of the Russian dialects. Another is derived from the fact of both the Lithuanians and Ugrians having suffered from the encroachment of the Russians ever since the beginning of the historical era. The advance has always been on one side. The Russ has pressed northward, westward, and eastward; the Ugrians and Lithuanians have retreated. But, better than mere presumptions there is evidence—historical and internal.
In Herodotus’s account of Scythia, the governments of Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, with parts of Kiev, Poltava, and Kharkhov, are occupied by a nation called the Skoloti. The informants of Herodotus, it is true, called them Scythæ, but Skolotoi was what they called themselves; and Skolotoi is the name that is most conveniently used when we wish to be specific. Their area coincides nearly with that of New Russia; nearly also with the Steppe district, as opposed to the fat black soils of the Middle Dneiper, if we consider it in respect to its physical geography. And this seems to determine the ethnology; since the Skoloti fall in two or more divisions, one nomadic, the other agricultural; the latter lying to the north of the former, just as is the case with the fertile lands as opposed to the bleak Steppes. The Royal Skoloti occupy the Crimea. The names of this family in detail are Alazones, Kallipidæ, Skythæ (Skoloti) Arotêres, Skythæ Georgi, and Skythæ Basileioi. But besides there is in the separate and disconnected population, viz., the Skythæ Apostantes, or the Seceding Skythians.
For the Skoloti a Slavonic origin has been claimed, and there is undoubtedly one decided fact in favour of their being so. But there is certainly no more. On the other hand, their Asiatic origin and their distribution connect them with the great Turk stock of Independent Tartary and a vast portion of Central Asia besides.
Furthermore, their eponymus is Targ-itaus, whose three sons are Leipoxais, Arpoxais, and Koloxais. The tradition concerning these as given by Herodotus is a tradition current among the Kherghis Turks at the present time. Lastly, the only word of the few glosses of the Skolotic language that can be explained by any known tongue in a plain straightforward manner, and without an undue amount of philological manipulation is the word oior=man, which is Turk throughout all the dialects of the Turk stock. The one decided fact in favour of a Sarmatian origin is the statement that certain Sauromatæ beyond the Don spoke the Skythian language. It should be added, however, that they spoke it with solecisms (σολοἱκοντες). Now it will readily be admitted that a Sarmatian population protruded as it were from the Lower Danube to the parts beyond the Donetz (Tanaïs), and thus isolated from its fellows, was just in the position to speak the language of the dominant occupants, and to speak it badly. Isolated, such Sarmatians undoubtedly were.
They were also mixed. The special statement of Herodotus is that they were descended, on one side, from the Skythæ of the country, on the other, from an invading body of Amazons. An explanation of this will be offered when the ethnology of Thrace comes under notice.
A second argument of far less value lies in the names of two Skoloti of rank—Aria-pithes, and Sparga-pithes. They are evidently compounds, whilst the latter name occurs in Persian, and the element -pith- (bed) in Armenian. This is a complication, since it suggests another class of affinities. Valeat quantum. The gloss oior, the descent from Targitaus, the legends of Koloxais, and the Asiatic origin stand against it. Besides which, a little ingenuity will explain away the root -pith. It may have been a title, as it actually is in Armenian, and, if so, a word belonging to the language of Herodotus’s informant, rather than to the Skolotic. Or the same class of Turk intrusions which introduced it into Europe, may have done the same in Persia; and this is not unlikely. It was just as much a proper name amongst the Massagetæ as it was amongst the Skoloti.
Turk invasion is the rule in Russia, and that of the Skoloti is the earliest on record. And it is in the very earliest records that it appears. The reasons for making it Turk have been considered; and it cannot have been Turk without having been comparatively recent. Consequently, there was a displacement of an earlier population, as is shown by the existence of an isolated population of Sauromatæ beyond the Donetz—in the country of the Don Kosaks.
But what are the reasons for supposing the Skolotic area of Herodotus to have been originally either Ugrian or Lithuanic, or, if not either exclusively, divided between the two? In the first place there are Ugrians as far south as the governments of Astrakhan and Simbirsk at the present moment; and that in situ, so to say, or in the position of indigenous occupants of their present localities rather than that of a newly introduced population. In the next place, there is more than one geographical term in the Skythian geography of the early writers which seems to belong to the Ugrian class of tongues; from which we may infer that, even if the informants of Herodotus did not take their geographical terms from the Ugrians themselves, they took them from a population with which the Ugrian area was conterminous.
1. The name Rhox-olani, occurring in Strabo, has long been considered Ugrian. No other class of languages forms the plural in -laine; several of the Ugrians do so.
2. The term Rhipæan, as applied to the Rhipæan Mountains, is Ugrian. Rhip=mountain in Ostiak.
3. The country of the Neuri was bounded by a lake, at the head of the river Tyras. There are certain geographical difficulties here, which this is no time to investigate. A swamp or fen is a more likely explanation. With this meaning, the word is Ugrian; and, at the present moment, the town of Narym in Siberia means, in Ostiak, the Fens.
Then comes the Lithuanian question; upon which the reasoning is far more elaborate; consisting chiefly in the exposition of an undoubted fact, and the suggestion of a new interpretation of it. No two parts of the world are so distant but what they may illustrate each other’s ethnology; and, in the present case, the ancient geography of Kherson and the Crimea is explained by that of Persia, Cabul, and Hindostan.
It has long been known that the ancient, sacred, and literary language of Northern India has its closest grammatical affinities in Europe. With none of the tongues of the neighbouring countries, with no form of the Tibetan of the Himalayas, of the Burmese dialects of the north-east, with no Tamul dialect of the southern part of the Peninsula itself, has it half such close resemblances as it has with a distant and disconnected language spoken on the Baltic—the Lithuanian.
As to the Lithuanian, it has, of course, its closest affinities with the Slavonic tongues of Russia, Bohemia, Poland, and Servia, since the Slavonic and Lithuanic are two branches of the same Sarmatian stock. But when we go beyond the Sarmatian stock, and bring into the field of comparison the other tongues of Europe, the Latin, the Greek, the German, and the Keltic, we find that, though the Lithuanic is more or less clearly connected with all of them, it is, beyond comparison, far liker the old Indian or Sanskrit.
Such is the undoubted fact, for which there are many doubtful explanations. Of these, the most unscientific is the most current.
1. The area of Asiatic languages in Asia allied to the Sanskrit is smaller than the area of European languages allied to the Lithuanic; and—
2. The class or genus to which the two tongues equally belong, is represented in Asia by the Sanskritic division only; whereas in Europe it falls into three divisions, each of, at least, equal value with the single Asiatic one—the Gothic, the Sarmatian, the Classical (Latin and Greek)—to which, if we extend the value of the term “Indo-European,” the Keltic may be added.
The botanist who, finding in Asia, extended over a comparatively small area, a single species, belonging to a genus which covered two-thirds of Europe, should pronounce the genus to be Asiatic, would be in the same position as an ethnologist who should derive the Indo-European stock of languages from India. Except so far as he might urge that everything came from the East, and so convert the specific question into an hypothesis as to the origin of vegetation in general, he would forfeit his character as a botanical logician. Neither would the zoologist who, mutatis mutandis, deduced the larger from the smaller, the complex from the simple, fare much better. Now it is a sad truth, that what no naturalist could attempt, philologists and ethnologists do with complacency; for so general is the acquiescence in the Eastern origin of the Indo-European tongues, that the possibility of every phenomenon connected with the Sanskrit and its allied dialects in Asia being explicable by means of a simple Sarmatian conquest from Southern Russia seems never to have been entertained.
The only part, however, of this complicated question which requires further consideration in a work like the present, is the necessity of bringing the Lithuanic and Indian areas as near each other as possible; a necessity which, by itself, justifies the assumption of a southward extension of the former. Hence, in addition to their present districts, the governments of Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev, Kherson, and the Taurida, are assigned to it. From these, either as indigenæ, or as the invaders of a country originally Ugrian, they conquered certain portions of Asia, just as the Majiars conquered Hungary, and just as the Greeks, some centuries later, conquered Hindostan. Their language was what afterwards became known as the Sanskrit, the Zend, the Persepolitan, and the Pali. Their occupancy ended when that of the Skoloti began; and it began some time anterior to the date of the earliest Sanskrit record. Such is the hypothesis; one which will, probably, find more favour with the naturalist than with the scholar. A subordinate reason for bringing the Lithuanians beyond their present area, will be given when the ethnology of Gallicia comes under notice.
Russian Poland.—When domestic faction and foreign intrigue succeeded in effecting the partition of the ancient and powerful kingdom of Poland, it disturbed a hitherto natural division, by dividing the Lekh division of the Slavonic branch of the Sarmatian stock between Russia, Austria, and Prussia.
Lekh is the name best suited for ethnological purposes, because it connects the modern kingdom of Poland with the country of the ancient and powerful Lygii, a name “widely spread over numerous states. It will be sufficient to name the most powerful, the Arii, the Manimi, the Helvecones, the Elysii, the Naharvali.”[14]
The religion of the first, and the warlike customs of the last of these nations, are noticed somewhat in detail; for the Naharvali celebrated certain rites within a holy grove, and with a priest in a woman’s dress. One of their deities was named Alcis; two others were the analogues of Castor and Pollux.
The fierce and powerful Arii stained their bodies, and with black shields chose the darkest nights for their terrible attacks.
That Tshekh and Lekh were the respective leaders of the Bohemians and Poles, is, with each nation, a native tradition. It is also under the name of Lekh that the latter are noticed by the oldest Slavonic historian—the monk Nestor.
The Naharvali were probably Lithuanians of East Prussia, rather than true Poles.
The Arii, according to the Lithuanic hypothesis of the Sanskrit language, may have been something much more important, viz., the Median Arii of the Asiatic invasion; in which case they were themselves either Lithuanian rather than Polish, or else (as is likely) the migration was Slavono-Lithuanic, instead of exclusively Lithuanic.
Upon the Lekh origin of the Helvecones, Manimi, and Elysii, there are no refinements.
Of the Polish area the eastern and northeastern parts seem to be the most recent, since, within the historical period, it has encroached upon that of the Lithuanians of Grodno and the Baltic provinces, and upon that of the Russniaks of Gallicia. In character, the language approaches the Tshekh of Bohemia, and the Sorabian of Lusatia and Saxony in the south and west. It was extended in the direction of the Elbe, as will be seen in the chapter on Prussia.
Unless it can be shown that the text of Tacitus is conclusive as to the Lygii having been Germans rather than what the name, place, and the belief of the Poles themselves suggest, the Poles of south-western Poland (at least) form the purest population which has been met with since we left the Basques; so that as far as it has been mixed at all, it has been through elements superadded to the original Lekh stock rather than through those of anything anterior to it. The Mongol invasions touched it; but that is all. The Roman and German conquests never reached it. Upon Russia, until the last century, it encroached. Hence, the elements of admixture that remain are Jewish, German, and others even less important still.
The language is a separate substantive tongue; the most cultivated of all the Slavonic forms of speech. From the Lithuanian it is broadly separated; less so from the Muscovite and Malorussian; but less still from the Bohemian and Sorabian.
A short analytical sketch of the component parts of the Russian populations will now be given.
The western half of the government of Arkhangel is Lapp, the eastern, Samoeid.
The Russian Lapps are all more or less Christianized. Reindeer and fish are their chief aliments, their habits being migratory.
Except in language, the Samoeid of the Arctic Circle differs but little from the Lapp, and even this difference has lately been shown to be less than was previously supposed. In manners they are somewhat ruder; whilst their Christianity is far more incomplete. Indeed, the old Shamanistic Paganism is their dominant religion. This they share with the Ostiaks, their neighbours on the south. But the most important fact connected with the Samoeids is their distribution and affinities. Along with populations more or less closely allied to them, they originally covered the whole of the vast region of Siberia; a region even at present occupied by them partially, and in detached localities, though the greater part of it is in possession of Mongol, Turk, and Tungusian populations—populations whose primary homes were in Central, rather than Northern Asia, but who have in all cases pressed northwards, and, in some, reached as far as the shores of the Arctic Sea. But as their occupation is incomplete, isolated fragments of the original populations still remain. Some of these are absolutely Samoeid, i.e., belonging to the same division of the same branch of the Ugrian stock. Others belong to different divisions. All, however, agree in speaking a language more akin to each other than to the Turks, Mongols, and Tungusians, by whom they are surrounded or separated.
The particular affinities of the Samoeids are with the Koibal, Kamash, and other tribes of Southern Siberia on the upper part of the Yenesey and on the very frontier of the Chinese empire.
Between these and the Samoeids of Arkhangel the population belongs to the class called Yeneseian. Now the language of the Yeneseians, though less like that of either of the Samoeid branches, than they are to each other, is still Ugrian rather than Turk, Mongol, or Tungusian. The same remark applies to a population as far east as the Kolyma, the Jukahiri. It is more Ugrian than Turk; yet the Yakut Turk of the Lena, rather than any Ugrian tongue, is the language with which it is in geographical contact. Lastly, it should be added that, according to a table of Ermann’s, the language of the Ugrian Ostiaks of the Obi, is more like that of the Kamskadales of Kamskatka than it is to the Turk tongues by which it is most immediately bounded. The inferences from all this are enormous extension and subsequent displacement of the Ugrian family.
The Lapps and Samoeids alone, of all the European populations, have been considered savages. They, too, only have been classed amongst the so-called inferior races. And it is undoubtedly true, that if we look to Europe alone, the line of demarcation which separates them from the Finlander (Ugrian as he is), and a fortiori from the Scandinavian and Slavonian is clear and trenchant. But Europe alone must not be looked to; neither must the Lapp and Samoeid be considered to cover the whole of their original area. Encroachment has taken place from the south, whereby the transitional varieties have become either extinct or amalgamate.
This is what we infer from the broken-up character of the Ugrian area in Siberia, as well as from the fact of the southern Samoeids, the Yeneseians, the Ostiaks, and several other populations being transitional in form and manner to the Ugrian of the Arctic and the Ugrian of the Southern, or Danubian, types.
The true Kwain of Finland, as contrasted with the Lapp, is light-haired, grey-eyed, and well-grown. The admixture of Swedish blood is considerable. A poem, approaching the character of the epic, and, at any rate, national and heroic, favourably represents the early capacity of the Kwain for appreciating song and music; and, in confirmation of the doctrine of a considerable displacement of the more southern members of the Lapp and Samoeid families, its subject is the conquest of Finland by the ancestors of its present occupants. The later civilizational influences are Swedish. So, too, is their Protestant and Lutheran Christianity. A sturdy tenacity of temper, combined with considerable bravery and power of endurance, has fairly been attributed to the Kwains. In Karelia the Swedish elements diminish. In Olonetz the Russian increase.
Of the government of St. Petersburg the original inhabitants were the Kwains of Ingria. In Esthonia the type changes. The population calls itself Rahwas, speaks a language akin to, but different from, the Kwain, a language, too, which from falling in, at least, two well-marked varieties, the Esthonian proper and the Esthonian of Dorpat, presents internal evidence of being no newly introduced form of speech, but, on the contrary, an old and original tongue.
In Livonia, or Lief-land, the oldest population was Lief; and the Liefs were Ugrians. A few only now remain. The first displacement was at the hands of the Lithuanian Letts, who are, at present, the chief population; themselves becoming, day by day, more and more Germanized—and, when not German, Slavonic.
Here, as in Finland, though in a less degree, there is a Swedish intermixture; indeed in one of the small islands of the Oesel Archipelago, the Isle of Worms, the population is Swede. In the Isle of Aaland it is Swedish, with a Ugrian basis.
Courland is Lithuanian, having once, in its eastern parts at least, been Ugrian; as was the whole of Liefland (Livonia). The river Salis runs across Liefland, and divides the northern half from the southern. This (there or thereabouts) constitutes the frontier. At Dorpat—which is a town of Liefland—the proper Esthonian changes its character, and so do several of the legends and traditions. Now, as the Dorpatians and the Liefs agree in those points wherein the Esthonians of the coast and Dorpatians differ, the following hypothesis has been suggested, viz.:—that when the Letts of Courland first pressed upon the Liefs of Livonia, these latter moved northwards towards Dorpat, then occupied by the typical Esthonians. These being displaced by the immigrant Liefs pressed the other Esthonians into South Finland.
Such displacements, however, of a population already settled and at peace, by some other weaker than itself, in consequence of aggressions from a third body of invaders, are commoner upon paper than in reality. The real fact seems to be that the country about Dorpat is intermediate in character to the Lief and Esthonian areas. From the mouth of the river Salis to Pabask, the present Liefs are the occupants of the sea-coast; probable descendants of the ancient Lemovii, the m being changed into v. That the -ov- is no part of the original word is shown by the forms Lami, and Lam-otina, Læm-onii, and Lam-methin. Nestor’s form more closely approaches the present, and is Lib’.
Judging from geographical names, as we find them on the common maps, Courland, as compared with Liefland, seems the more Germanized country of the two.
Courland and Liefland are the areas of the Lett, or Lettonian division of the Lithuanic stock; Vilna and Grodno are Proper Lithuanian—Lithuanian Proper and Samogitian. The later intrusions are from Poland. The Russian elements, too, of Vilna and Grodno have been Polonized; unless we prefer to say that the Pole elements have been Russianized. This means that when the language of Lithuania is neither the true Polish nor the true Lithuanic, it is what is called White Russian, a Poloniform dialect of the Russ. The geographical names in Vilna are easily distinguished from the Muscovite. The derivatives in -skaja, so common in St. Petersburg and Novogorod, are replaced by forms in -ichki.
The Lithuanian nations of the Jaczwingi and Pollexiani extended, at the beginning of the historical period, as far south as the Marsh of Pinsk, at the head-waters of the Pripecz, so that the northern part of Minsk was Lithuanic in the tenth century. All prolongations beyond this are ethnological rather than historical, i.e., they rest on inference rather than testimony.
The eastern part of Minsk, on the strength of the word Narym[15] is considered to have been Ugrian. The whole government is at present Russian, with (as is supposed) a Lithuanic and Ugrian basis; the Neuri, whether Ugrians, Lithuanians, or Ugro-Lithuanians having formed a portion of its oldest population.
Volhynia is considered to have been originally Lithuanic, for two reasons—the necessity of bringing down the early Lithuanic area as far in one direction as Gallicia, and as far in another as the Lower Don.
Podolia is Maloruss, or Russniak, its present population having been an extension of the Gallician Russniaks. It is considered to have been originally Lithuanic, from the necessity of bringing that area towards the Lower Don.
Kherson and Ekaterinoslav are eminently heterogeneous. Ugrian, perhaps, at first: they then became Lithuanic, then Skolotic, Hun, Avar, Alan, Khazar, Mongol, and Russian, not to mention recent colonies of Germans and Armenians. The extent to which the heterogeneous population of these parts differs from that of the more Slavonic governments of Russia, and approaches that of the true Turk areas is shown by the name Little Tartary, and New Russia, by which they are often designated.
Taurida is a study of itself. It may have been Ugrian at first. The points of resemblance between the ancient Tauri and Thracians of Thrace I refer to a common Sarmatian origin. But what does this mean? Sarmatian blood from the Lower Danube, or Sarmatian blood from Lithuania? or both? Then there were displacements effected by the tribes of Caucasus—Abasgi, in the classical times, Circassians under the Byzantine Empire. Then Greek colonies. Then Skolotic conquests. Then the other varieties of Turk occupancy. Besides this, comes that of the Goths of Lower Danube, and lastly, the Greeks of Byzantium, the Genoese of Kaffa, and the Mongols.
In Bessarabia, Turks and Moldavians are the predominant population. Divided between Getæ and Skoloti, at the beginning of the historical period, it has since had its full share of foreign invasion. The particular Turk population, however, is that of the Budziaks; such being the name of the so-called Tartars of Bessarabia. The date of their introduction is probably that of the Crimean Turks. Another variety consists in a more recent colony of Nogays, from the government of Astrakhan.
The Russians Proper, like those of New Russia, are the latest elements of all. Hence, the view of the Bessarabian population is that it is Turk on the eastern, and Moldavian on the western frontier, with Slavonic and German superadditions.
Kosak is a word which is now generally admitted to be of Turk origin. In its present signification it has a military or political rather than an ethnological sense. It means a horse-soldier owing military service to the Russian Empire.
His locality, his semi-feudal duties, and his blood, all vary. The Kosaks of the Don are chiefly Malorussian, with considerable Turk, some Circassian, and also some Mongol, intermixture.
But besides the true Kosak of the Don there is a Kalmuk colony in the country as well; an offset from the greater settlement on the Volga. These are true Mongols in manners, in physiognomy, and, to a great extent, in creed. They are also the most south-western members of the family to which they belong. Their introduction is recent; for it must be remembered that the so-called Mongol conquest of Russia, although effected by the successors of Zingis-Khan, was Turk rather than true Mongolian, the previously conquered Turks of Tartary and Siberia being the chief agents.
Voronej is the country of the ancient Budini and Geloni, the country of the forest rather than the steppe, both in the days of Herodotus and at the present time. The Geloni, I think, like the proper Skoloti, were Turks, intrusive upon a previously Ugrian population—a Ugrian population continued southwards from the governments of Penza, Simbirsk, and Saratov.
North and east of Tambov the original Ugrian population is no longer a matter of inference. In Penza the geographical names betray the recent occupancy of Ugrians of the Morduin branch. In Nizhni Novogorod, Simbirsk, and Kasan, the Morduins still exist; falling into three divisions, and speaking a peculiar language. On the Oka they call themselves Ersad, on the Sura Mokshad. In the neighbourhood of Kasan they are called by the Turks Karatai. Imperfectly Christianized they still retain much of their original Shamanism; are well-grown, in respect to size and stature, thin-bearded, and with brown rather than either black or flaxen hair. In A.D. 1837, their numbers were about 92,000.
The next Ugrian family in the same governments is that of the Tsheremiss, on the left bank of the Volga. Smaller in stature than the Morduins, they have but little beard, smooth skins, light hair, and flat faces. Imperfectly Christianized, and imperfectly agricultural: they still retain much of their original Paganism as well as of their nomadic habits. Their language belongs to the second class of Ugrian tongues spoken in these south-western portions of the Ugrian area. On the right bank of the Volga, and opposite the Tsheremiss are the Tshuvatsh also in the governments of Simbirsk, Kasan, and Saratov. Of the three families they are the most numerous, exceeding 300,000. Their hair is often black, and somewhat curly; and if the Morduin recede from the proper Ugrian type and approach the Slavonians, the Tshuvatsh do the same in respect to the Turks. Their language, too, contains an inordinate proportion of Turk words: indeed, by several good authorities, it has been considered an intermediate or transitional form of speech.
The Ugrians are the oldest occupants of the government of Kasan, the Turks the most numerous.
Of the same date with those of the Crimea, they represent the Mongol conquerors of the thirteenth century. Mixed in blood, Mahometan in creed, the Tartars of Kasan are “of middle stature and muscular, but not fat. Their heads are of an oval shape; their countenances of fresh complexion, and fine regular features; their eyes, mostly black, are small and lively; their noses arched and thin as well as their lips. Their hair is generally dark, and their teeth strong; their gesture full of dignity and grace. The same remarks apply to the females, but the expression of their countenances is lost through their manner of life, and the natural attractiveness of their persons is lessened by ornament and paint.”[16]
Their civilization is on a level with that of the Osmanli.
The Turk area extends eastwards, the Ugrian is continued north and north-west. The Udmart, or Udy of the river Viatka, are the Votiaks of the Russians and the Ari of the Turks, imperfect Christians, agriculturalists rather than nomades, and with more red-haired individuals amongst them than any other population. Eminently unmixed, they live not only in separate houses but in separate villages.
The Uralian range itself is the occupancy of the Vogul, and here the type changes. The flatness of feature increases; the stature diminishes; the habits are ruder. Hunting is the chief means of subsistence. Both in this respect and in language, the affinities of the Voguls are, with the Asiatic rather than the European Ugrians—the Ostiaks rather than the Permians.
The Votiaks, on the other hand, lead through the Permians and Siranians to the Finlanders. The former of these give their name to the government of Perm, the Biarmaland of the old Norse Sagas. They are now nearly Russianized; but tumuli, Arabic coins, an ancient alphabet, and an early Christianity, attest their capacity for civilization. The Siranians of the government of Vologda are closely allied to the Permians, and not very far removed from the Kwains.
Two other populations require notice. The Bashkirs of Orenburg deeply indent the southern part of Perm. Imperfect Mahometans, they speak Turkish, but depart widely in their physiognomy from the Turks of Kasan; so much so that Klaproth and others consider them to be Ugrians who have changed their language. They are, more probably, Ugrian on the mother’s side only, the Turks having intruded. During summer they wander either to hunt or to tend their herds and flocks; in winter they unwillingly fix themselves to some locality under the covert of a forest, and reside in houses. The Metsheriak, the Teptiar, and some other tribes, are Turks belonging to the same group. They belong, however, to Orenburg and Siberia rather than to European Russia.
The Ostiaks occupy part of the government of Perm, the part that lies beyond the Uralian range, and which is, consequently, Asiatic. They are hunters and fishers, less in size and more imperfectly Christianized than the Voguls. I believe them to have been the gold-keeping griffins (Gryphes) of Herodotus; though, to do this, the story of their relations to the Arimaspi must be supposed to have arisen in Armenia—no unlikely quarter, considering the probable line of the gold trade. A curious passage in Moses of Chorene tells us that the root Astyag, in the Old Armenian, signifies a dragon: and that Astyages, the Mede, was, in the eyes of an Armenian, Astyages Draco. Now, the locality of the Ostiaks is nearly that of the Uralian gold-mines, while just below them were the Tsheremiss, whose name in the mouths, first of a Skolotian and then of a Greek, might easily become Arimasp. The Greek could not pronounce the tsh; and as numerous Turkish words end in -asp, the -p might have been added on the principle which in English converts asparagus into sparrowgrass.
We have thus been brought round to the Finlanders of Finland.
With the reasons already given for considering the Russian in general to be a population of comparatively recent introduction, with the evidence in favour of the Skoloti having been intrusive Turks; and with the necessity of bringing the Lithuanians as far south as the Asiatic frontier, it is, surely, not too much to assert the doctrine that the original Russia was divided between two populations—one akin to the Permian, one to the Lithuanian. The line which divided them is, perhaps, an insoluble problem. Pskov and Smolensko, at least, may be given to the latter; Vladimir, Kostroma, Yaroslav, Moskow, and Tambov, to the former—Tula, Orlov, Koursk, Riazan, Tshernigov, Kharkhov, and Poltava, being left undistributed.
Further details respecting the Turk intrusions into Eastern Europe still stand over.
So do certain further questions respecting the Asiatic conquests of the Sarmatians.
They will be considered in the ethnology of Turkey.
The origin of the name Russ, however, requires a present notice. The word itself is Ugrian, but it became attached to the empire of Russia through the conquests of the Swedes. Certain Swedes, in the ninth century, having invaded the country of the (then) Ugrian Rhoxolani, extended their conquests so far southwards as to reach the Black Sea on the one side, and the Caspian on the other. They were objects of terror to the Byzantians; and in a curious passage of Constantine Porphyrogeneta we learn that the Falls of the Dnieper had two names, one Russ, and one Slavonic—Russ meaning Swedish or Norse. So that an undetermined amount of Swedish blood must be given to the Muscovite and Malorussian areas, as well as to the Baltic Provinces; and a time must be recognized when the word Russ meant the Norse conqueror of the parts on the Dnieper and Volga, in opposition to the conquered Slavonian. At the same time the Norse Russ was Russian only as an Anglo-Saxon of Kent was a Briton. He was a settler in the land of the older Slavonians and the still older Ugrian Rhoxolani.
WALLACHIA AND MOLDAVIA.—RUMANYOS.—PHYSICAL APPEARANCE.—DESCENT FROM THE DACI.—SARMATIAN ORIGIN.—SERVIA.—MONTENEGRO.
Wallachia and Moldavia.—The Wallachians and Moldavians are in the same relations to the Romans and ancient Daci as the French are to the Romans and Kelts, or the Spaniards to the Romans and Iberians. Like the degenerate Greeks of the Byzantine empire, they call themselves Roman; and their language, like the Rumonsch of the Grisons and the Romaic of modern Hellas, is Romane.
As the two principalities represent only a portion of the ancient Dacia, the ethnological and political divisions differ; for, though all Wallachians and all Moldavians are Rumanyos the whole of the Rumanyos are not Wallachian and Moldavian. They are also indigenous to Transylvania and Bukhovinia. In Bulgaria, Thrace, and Macedonia, there are, probably, intruders. Light made, with dark skins, black eyes, and prominent features, they stand in strong contrast to both the Russians and the Slovaks, with which they are in geographical contact. Nor is it safe to refer this to Roman blood, since, according to Mr. Paget, the Dacians of Trajan’s column have similar features—at least as far as the profile goes, and as far as the description of a Transylvanian Rumanyo applies to those of Wallachia and Moldavia.
Of all the districts on the Danube, Wallachia and Moldavia have been the least disturbed during the last sixteen centuries. This, though it is saying but little for a country in the most afflicted part of Europe, is the inference from the continued existence of their language. Displaced in all the other Danubian provinces it is still the native tongue to upwards of 200,000 protected and half independent Rumanyi.
In detail, the ancient inhabitants of Wallachia were the Potulatensii, the Sensii, the Salrensii, the Kiageisi, and the Piephagi of Strabo.
In Moldavia, there had been a displacement as early as the time of Herodotus.
The Skoloti of Russia reached the Carpathians, inasmuch as they were conterminous with the Agathyrsi, and the Agathyrsi were on the Maros, i.e., in Transylvania.
Whether the Skoloti extended thus far westward, when Trajan conquered Decebalus is uncertain. I think that during the interval between the time of Herodotus and the Dacian war, the Skoloti had either retired or become amalgamated; so that the Dacian population lay in one large uniform mass from the Vallum Romanum in Hungary to the Solitude of the Getæ in Bessarabia. The reasons for this are drawn from the language.
1. This is uniform throughout, and uniformity of speech in the case of exotic languages, is primâ facie evidence of the uniformity in both the tongue which is introduced and the original tongue of the country. For identical fruits we must have like stocks as well as like grafts. The Roman in a Keltic country becomes French; in an Iberic, Spanish.
2. The terminations -ensii and -dava are common to the whole Dacian area—Predan-ensii, Rhatac-ensii, Alboc-ensii, Burid-ensii, Potulat-ensii, Satr-ensii, S-ensii, Cot-ensii, Cauco-ensii—Comi-dava, Perobori-dava, Rhami-dava, Neter-dava, Burri-dava, Argi-dava, &c.
Of the uniformity of language no country, of which the early history is equally obscure, shows stronger proofs than ancient Dacia.
The reasons for believing this to have been Sarmatian will be given in the sequel.
Tolerably pure, for a Danubian population, the Rumanyos of Wallachia are Romano-Slavonic. In Moldavia there is a trace of Turk (Skolotic) blood.
Servia.—Our divisions are political; so Servia, as an independent principality, must be dealt with by itself; and as, from their complexity, the Austrian and Ottoman empires are reserved for the last, it will be separated from the areas with which it is most immediately connected—Southern Hungary and Bosnia.
Bounded by the rivers Drin and Timoc, the present principality coincides nearly, though not quite, with the Roman Province of Mœsia Superior.
The valley of the Margus is the famous Plain of the Triballi (Τριβαλλἱκον πἑδιον; the mountains, those of the Macedonian, Illyrian, and Bulgarian frontiers.
There is the special evidence of Strabo that the Triballi and Mœsi were Thracians, and that the Thracians and Dacians spoke the same language. On the other hand, we learn from the same writer, that immediately to the west of the Triballi, the Thracian type ended and the Illyrian began. Without at present asking what this class may be, it is important to know that three such large groups are reducible to any single class at all. Neither is internal evidence wholly wanting for Upper Mœsia, the only portion of the Lower Danube now under notice. There is but a short list of geographical names: it contains, however, a Thermi-dava and a Pic-ensii.
We know almost as much of the wars of the Macedonians against the Triballi, as of those of the Romans against the Mœsi. Philip and Alexander each imperfectly reduced them. The reign of Augustus is signalized by the Dalmatian and Pannonian triumphs. Upper Mœsia was reduced at the same time.
Montenegro.—In the small Republic of Montenegro, of which the southern side is bounded by Albania, the population is Slavonic, differing from that of Bosnia and Hertzegovna only in being independent of the Porte, and Christian instead of Mahometan. The impracticable character of the country, and the martial spirit of its occupants, have preserved this single spot free from Turkish conquest. How far the blood is pure is doubtful: since the influence of the Roman conquest of Dalmatia, as well as that of the Greek settlements about Epidaurus is undetermined, neither is there any clear line of demarcation between the earliest ancestors of the Skipetar and the early ancestors of Slavonians in regard to their respective frontiers, north and south. It is probable, indeed, that the very earliest occupants of the Montenegro (Czernogora, or, Black Mountain) may have belonged to the former population; at present, however, the antipathy between the two nations is extreme; and in no part of the whole Slavonic area are the Slavonic characteristics more marked than in Montenegro.
FRISIAN, SAXON, DUTCH, AND GOTHIC GERMANS.—GERMANIZED KELTS.—GERMANIZED SLAVES.—PRUSSIA.—ISOLATION OF ITS AREAS.—EAST AND WEST PRUSSIA.—PRUSSIAN POLAND.—POMERANIA.—PRUSSIAN SILESIA.—PRUSSIAN SAXONY.—BRANDENBURG.—UCKERMARK.—SOUTH-WESTERN PORTION.—WESTPHALIAN AND RHENISH PRUSSIA.—MECKLENBURG.—SAXONY.—LINONES OF LUNEBURG.—HANOVER AND OLDENBURG.—HOLLAND.—HESSE-CASSEL, HESSE-DARMSTADT, NASSAU.—BADEN.—WURTEMBURG.—WEIMAR.—RHENISH BAVARIA.—DANUBIAN BAVARIA.
AS a general rule the Germanic, or Gothic, stock has not only held its own area from the earliest time, but has encroached on that of others, so that although there are many parts of Europe, which, once the occupancy of non-Germanic populations, have now become more or less German, the converse rarely, if ever, can be shown to have taken place. Hence, almost all the districts which were originally German, are German now. The chief exception, if it be one, occurs in Belgium, where the Gallo-Roman family, has, perhaps, encroached on the Gothic.
But, though the Old Germany be Germanic still, there is a great part of the Modern Germany which was not so even at the beginning of the historical period. Some portion of the present area was Keltic, and a still greater was Sarmatian. Besides which, the original population of no inconsiderable section is uncertain. All this somewhat reduces the simplicity of the ethnology. And to this, it must be added, that the Teutonic (or German) branch of the great Gothic stock falls into some important divisions. The Frisians of Friesland represent one of these, our Anglo-Saxon ancestors another, the Old Saxons of Westphalia a third, the Low Dutch of Holland a fourth, the High Dutch of Bavaria a fifth, the Goths of the Old Ostrogoth and Visigoth conquests a sixth. Now the intestine movements of these different divisions have always been great; so that, although we shall rarely hear of any Germanic population having been overlaid by Slavonians or Kelts, the phenomenon of Saxons superseded by Low Dutch, Low Dutch by High and other similar displacements will be common.
The divisions, then, of the Germanic area are as follows:—
1st. There is the pure and proper country of the indigenous Germans, wherein all the important elements of admixture are limited to the different divisions and subdivisions of the Germanic family.
2nd. There is the area which was originally Sarmatian falling into—
a. The Lithuanic, and—
b. The Slavonic districts.
3rd. There is the tract which was originally Keltic.
4th. The parts whose original ethnology is uncertain.
The details of the different political divisions supply us with the commentary on this classification.
Prussia.—The kingdom of Prussia well illustrates the difficulty of making ethnology and politics agree. It falls into two parts separated from each other. Of these the first, with the possible exception of its south-western corner, was wholly Sarmatian in the tenth century; as Sarmatian as England was Keltic, or Spain Iberic. The population, too, was referable to both branches of the Sarmatian stock—the Slavonic as well as the Lithuanic.
In East Prussia it is easily seen that the geographical names are not German. Neither are they Russian. The Old Prussian, a member of the Lithuanic family of languages, was spoken here as late as the sixteenth century, remains of which, in the shape of a catechism, are extant. This is the language of the ancient Æstyi, or Men of the East, which Tacitus says was akin to the British, an error arising from the similarity of name, since a Slavonian (if such were the original source of his information) would call the two languages by names so like as Prytskaia and Brytskaia, and a German (if the authority were Germanic) by names so like as Pryttisc and Bryttisc. The Guttones, too, of Pliny, whose locality is fixed from the fact of their having been collectors of the amber of East Prussia and Courland, were of the same stock. The name by which they were known to the Slavonians within the historical period was Guddon=Gothones, Guttones.
In West Prussia the extermination or amalgamation of the native Lithuanians was earlier. We have no specimens of their language. We know, however, that the country took its name from them. They seem to have been the most western members of their family. The southern frontier of the present Prussia is Polish.
Prussian Poland—the Duchy of Posen—is now, as it always has been, Sarmatian, Slavonic, Lekh, Lygian.
Pomerania, too, retains vestiges of its Slavonic population in the Kaszeb, Kassubes, or Kassubitæ, occupants of the peninsula and islands at the mouth of the Oder. The name, too, of the province at large, is Slavonic; po=on+more=sea=coast-land.
The Isle of Rugen was one of the last strongholds of Slavonic Paganism, as is shown by its numerous antiquities, and by the evidence of history. The famous temple of the Obotrite Slavonians was there; though Mecklenburg rather than Pomerania was the part of the continent to which they belonged.
In Prussian Silesia, the Serskie of Lower and the Srbie of Upper Lusatia, still Slavonic, retain their language, and represented the older population of the whole country.
The Saale was the original boundary between the Germans and the Slaves, all between Thuringia and Poland belonging to that stock. Certain as this is from the accounts of the conquest under the Carlovingian empire, the details are difficult for Prussian Saxony, Altmark, and Brandenburg. The Hevelli were on the Hevel: the Stoderani, Brizani, Bethenici, Dossani, and Smeldingi filled up much of the valleys of the Oder and the Elbe: we cannot, however, fill up the whole tract. Yet, the names of the Marches, or Borders, show that the encroachment was gradual. First, and nearest to Germany, is the old march (Altmark); after this, the Middle march (Mittel mark); and then the March of the Ukrians (Uckermark), all originally frontiers between the encroaching Germans and the retiring Slavonians, and all frontiers within the historical period.
But Ucker-mark was a Border, or Debatable land in the eyes of the Slavonians, as well as their conquerors; and the name of its original occupants signified Borderers. The kr-is the kr-in U-krain-, as well as in the word Grenz, which, though German at present, is in origin, Slavonic. The form Uckri, Ucrani, and Uncrani, indicate this. Perhaps, though only perhaps, this Ukrian March—this Brandenburg Ukraine—may have separated the most western Lithuanians of Prussia from the Slavonians of the water-system of the Oder; if so, the word is an instrument of criticism, as it certainly is in many other interesting instances.
In part of the circle of Kotbus, the Sorabian of Silesia is still spoken.
The south-western districts of Prussia east of the Saale, Hesse, an outlying portion of Hanover, and Weimar, along with a narrow strip on the Brunswick frontier, are the only parts of the western half of the Proper Brandenburg Prussia that began with being Germanic; and even here there seems to have been intermixture. The Hanoverian frontier seems to have been wholly Slavonic.
Of Rhenish Prussia, Westphalia was originally Saxon—not exactly Angle or Anglo-Saxon, but slightly differing from the Anglo-Saxon in language. It was Old-Saxon. The Old-Saxon language, however, is extinct, and the blood considerably mixed. Encroachment and conquest of Low Dutch and High Dutch Germans from the South, in the ninth and tenth centuries, effected this. There were, also, a few Slavic colonies. Otherwise the blood is German; though neither wholly Dutch nor wholly Saxon. The old tribes of Westphalian Prussia were the Chamavi, Bructeri, and Angrivarii.
In Berg, Cleves, and the parts about Cologne, the Ubii, Tenchteri, Sicambri, and other allied tribes, were, probably, Dutch rather than Saxon, and Low Dutch rather than High. On the French frontier there is a Keltic basis; Cologne claims a notable amount of Roman blood.
Mecklenburg.—The great Slavonic nation of Mecklenburg was the Obotrites; after them the Wilzi, the Tollenzi, and the Rethrarii of the old pagan town of Rethre. The dukes of Mecklenburg alone, of all the numerous dynasts of Germany, are of Slavonic extraction.
Saxony.—Either conquered from Westphalian Saxony, or settled by Saxon colonies, the kingdom to which Dresden is the metropolis, originally the country of the Semnones, is German only in language. In blood it belongs to the same division with Silesia; indeed the Sorabian frontier (for so the Srbie, and Serskie may conveniently be called) extended as far westwards as the Saale.
Hanover.—From Hanover, the north-east quarter (there or thereabouts) must be deducted as Slavonic. Luneburg took its name from the Slavonic Linones, whose language was spoken in a few villages as late as the last century.
The remaining three-fourths are German; and from the extent of the kingdom and the irregularity of its outline, four out of the six divisions of the old Germanic populations may have been contained in it.
From the Ems to the Elbe, extended to an undetermined distance inland, the ancient tribes were the Chauci and Frisii, who were Frisians. Embden is the capital of East Friesland, where the Frisian language was general until the seventeenth century, and where, in one or two localities, it is still spoken at the present moment.
A line drawn from the Dutch district of Drenthe to the Hartz would pass through the country of the Old Saxons; one from Hamburg to Minden, through that of the Anglo-Saxons. The Longobardi, Chatti, and Cherusci, some portions of whom, whether High or Low, were Dutch, extended towards the Hartz. Soon after this the Slavonic area began.
Oldenburg.—Undoubtedly Frisian in its northern, Oldenburg was either Frisian or Old Saxon in its southern, parts.
Holland.—If the Dutch of Holland be the indigenous dialect of any part of that country, it is only so for the southern third of it. The Frisians are the oldest occupants.
Hesse-Cassel, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Nassau, the two former, the localities of the Chatti, take us from the Saxons and Frisians to the true Dutch or Germans. At present their language is High German. Probably, it was so at the beginning. I do not, however, pretend to say where the Low-Dutch form of speech originated. It has encroached upon the Frisian and Saxon; and, in all the parts where it is now spoken, with the exception, perhaps, of the parts below Cologne, is of foreign origin. On the other hand, however, the High German of Franconia, Suabia, and Bavaria has encroached on it.
Weimar, Gotha, Saxe-Meiningen, Schwartzburg, Coburg, and the south-western corner of Prussia, are considered to form the area of the ancestors of those Germans who, in the second, third, and fourth centuries played so conspicuous a part on the Lower Danube, under Alaric, Theodoric, and others. The following is submitted as a sketch of their history. As the Hermunduri of the country in which the Albis (the Saale rather than the Bohemian Elbe) rises, they are known to Tacitus; but their power, as elements of the great empire of Maroboduus has been felt by the Romans of Rhætia and Vindelicia nearly a century earlier. Encroaching southwards, and crossing the watershed of the Elbe and Danube (the Fichtelgebirge) they displace the probably Slavonic occupants of the valley of the Naab; press on further both southwards and eastwards; form, along their line, with the nations to the north, a March, but not of a character so hostile as to exclude the formation of confederacies formidable to Rome, under the name of Marcomanni; make their permanent settlements on the northern side of the Lower Danube; harass the Roman provinces, Thrace and Mœsia, until, themselves harassed by the Huns, they cross the Danube and effect settlements in Mœsia, where they become Arian Christians, and read the Gospel of Ulphilas, in their native tongue. Portions retrace their steps, still marking their way by conquest. Ataulphus in Gaul, Wallia in Spain, Theodoric in the Italy of the sixth, and Alaric in the Italy of the fifth century, all having been Goths of this division. They leave Germany as Grutungs and Thervings (Thuringians), become Marcomanni along the Bohemian and Moravian frontiers, Goths,[17] Ostrogoths and Visigoths, on the Lower Danube (or the land of the Getæ), and Mœsogoths (from the locality in which they became Christian) in Mœsia.
Wurtemburg, Baden, and Hohenzollern coincide with the Agri Decumates of the Roman writers. The original inhabitants, I believe, to have been Slaves and Kelts; then Kelts more exclusively (the Gauls of the western bank of the Rhine having encroached); then a heterogeneous mass of Gauls, Boii, Suevi, and Vindelicians, occupying a sort of Debatable Land between the Roman and non-Roman areas; lastly Alemanni and Suevi, the latter being Germans, the former a mixture of populations with the Germanic element preponderating. From these are descended the present occupants.
Bavaria, like Prussia, falls into two divisions; the Bavaria of the Rhine, and the Bavaria of the Danube. In Rhenish Bavaria the descent is from the ancient Vangiones and Nemetes, either Germanized Gauls, or Gallicized Germans, with Roman superadditions. Afterwards, an extension of the Alemannic and Suevic populations from the right bank of the Upper Rhine completes the evolution of their present Germanic character.
Danubian Bavaria falls into two subdivisions.
North of the Danube the valley of the Naab, at least, was originally Slavonic, containing an extension of the Slavonic population of Bohemia. But disturbance and displacement began early. The Thervings and Grutungs from the north of the Fichtelgebirge made their way to the Danube along these lines.
In the third and fourth centuries, the Suevi and Alemanni extended themselves from the upper Rhine.
The western parts of Bavaria, on the Wurtemburg frontier, perhaps as Slavonic as the valley of the Naab, differ, in their subsequent history, by having witnessed displacements from the south and west, from the Helvetians of Switzerland, and the Boii of Gaul, rather than from the Germans on the north. The later changes are the same in both cases.
The north-western parts of Bavaria were probably German from the beginning.
South of the Danube the ethnology changes. In the first place the Roman elements increase; since Vindelicia was a Roman Province. What, however, was the original basis? Probably, Slavonic on its eastern, Helvetian or Keltic on the western side. Its present character has arisen from an extension of the Germans of the upper Rhine.
GREAT BRITAIN.—DENMARK.—THE ISLANDS.—THE VITHESLETH.—FYEN.—LAUENBURG.—HOLSTEIN.—SLESWICK.—JUTLAND.—ICELAND.—THE FEROE ISLES.—NORWAY.—SWEDEN.—LAPPS.—KWAINS.—GOTHLANDERS.—ANGERMANNIANS.—THEORY OF THE SCANDINAVIAN POPULATION.
AS the ethnology of the British Islands is made the subject of a separate volume,[18] the present notice will be confined to the simple statement of the Irish, the Scotch Gaels, the Manksmen, and the Welsh being Kelts, and the English, Germans; the Keltic populations being indigenous, the German, intrusive.
Scandinavia comes next in order, the arrangement being strictly natural; since, whatever may have been the original population of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, the present is of Germanic origin, and speaks a language belonging to the great Gothic class; the Danish and Swedish being mutually intelligible.
The Islands.—The Danish Islands fall into two groups, one containing the Isle of Fyen, the other the ancient Vithesleth, or the four islands of Sealand, Laaland, Moen, and Falster. This division is ancient, and in the eyes of some of the older writers of considerable import; since the true country of Dan, the eponymus of the Danes, was not Jutland, not yet Skaane (the southern part of Sweden), nor yet Fyen. It was the Four Islands of the Vithesleth:—“Dan—rex primo super Sialandiam, Monam, Falstriam, et Lalandiam, cujus regnum dicebatur Vithesleth. Deinde super alias provincias et insulas et totum regnum.”—Petri Olai Chron. Regum Daniæ. Also, “Vidit autem Dan regionem suam, super quam regnavit, Jutiam, Fioniam, Withesleth, Scaniam, quod esset bona.”—Annal. Esrom. p. 224.
That this word Vithesleth is a compound, that its first element is a Gentile name, and that the population which bore it was other than the modern Danes will be suggested in the sequel. At present it is enough to remember that the existing population of the four eastern islands is Germanic on a hitherto unvestigated basis. The men of the Vith-es-leth it is convenient to call Vitæ.
In Fyen the Gothic elements are the same as in the Vithesleth, the differentiæ consisting in the difference of the original basis, provided that such existed. This may or may not have been the case; since it by no means follows that because the islands of the Vithesleth differed from Fyen, that difference was ethnological. It may have been only political.
Lauenburg.—In the tenth century Lauenburg is Slavonic; its occupants being a population called Po-labi; called also Po-lab-ingii. As po means on, and Laba is the Slavonic form for the Elbe, the name is a compound, like Pomerania (on the sea). The Polabi, then, were the Slavonians of the Elbe. They were an extreme population; since the river Bille divided them from the Germans of Stormar, Holstein, and Ditmarsh. But though the Polabi of Lauenburg were a frontier population they were not isolated. They were in geographical continuity with the Linones of Luneburg, and the Obotrites of Mecklenburg. Reduced by the Carlovingian Franks, Lauenburg became Low German; as it is at the present time.
Holstein.—The name of the duchy is German, and derived from a German population—the Holsati. But the Holsati were neither the only occupants, nor the only Germans of these parts. The Stormarii of Stormar, and the Dietmarsi of Ditmarsh are equally mentioned by the writers of the eighth century. Earlier still we hear of the Sabalingii and Sigulones. The Holsati, Dietmarsi, and Stormarii, were either Angles or Frisians.
So much for the western half of the duchy. The eastern was Slavonic; even as Lauenburg was Slavonic, the particular population being that of the Wagri. They are a frontier population; and this may, possibly, be denoted by the name, which contains the same elements as that of the Ucri of Uckermark, and the Malorussians of the Ukraine.
Sleswick.—With Slavonians on the Baltic, and Frisians on the Atlantic, the original ethnology of Sleswick seems to have been that of the sister duchy. In Sleswick, however, the Frisian population still exists, extended from Husum to Tondern. In Sleswick also we have a portion of the Jute population of Jutland.
Jutland.—If the combination, J+t as it occurs in the word Jute, being the same as the G+t in Got, or Goth, we have a reason in favour of one of its earlier populations having been Lithuanic.
Then we have the Slavonians of Holstein and Sleswick to the south. How far these extended northwards is uncertain. Between the two, however, I believe that eastern Jutland, at least, was Sarmatian before it was German.
The next elements were Frisian; since traces of the Frisian occupancy are found as far north as the Liimfjord—and beyond it.
The present language is Danish.
Originally the area of the non-Germanic Jutæ, Jutland, took its first Germanic population from the Frisian area, its second from that of the early Scandinavians. Where this was, and what the Jutæ were, however, are complex questions which will be noticed towards the end of the chapter.
Iceland.—The Icelanders are one of the purest populations in the world. Foreign elements arising out of the admixture of any population antecedent to the present there are none. Foreign elements in the original stock are but few; since it was from Norway and not from Denmark that, in the ninth century, the island was peopled; and the Norwegians are the purest portion of the Scandinavian stock. As a general rule, the islanders are somewhat taller than the Norsemen of the continent. In the other external points of appearance they are similar. But an observation of Dr. Schleisner’s respecting their animal heat is important. “The internal warmth of the human body is between 36.50° and 37° centigrade, and this passes for being the general temperature in all latitudes, and in all climates, for all human beings, except new-born children. But with a very delicate thermometer, well-fitted for the purpose and which had previously been tried by other excellent instruments, I have found from experiments on twelve healthy individuals that the temperature within the cavity of the mouth was as follows:—
AGE. | DEGREES. | |
23 | . . . | 37.3° |
18 | . . . | 37.5° |
17 | . . . | 37.2° |
19 | . . . | 37.5° |
24 | . . . | 37.° |
20 | . . . | 36.5° |
18 | . . . | 37.8° |
17 | . . . | 37.6° |
19 | . . . | 36.8° |
37 | . . . | 37.4° |
23 | . . . | 37.5° |
20 | . . . | 37.2° |
Average | . . . | 37.27° centigrade.”[19] |
As far as this differs from that of the Norwegians—a point upon which our information is so incomplete as to make the previous table suggestive rather than conclusive—the difference must be put down to climate and similar external influences, rather than to that of what is called race.
The Icelandic language has altered so little within the last one thousand years that it is nearly the same as that of the old Sagas and poems; Sagas and poems which every Icelander can read. On the other hand, the change on the continent has been so great that no modern dialect of Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, is intelligible to an Icelander. Neither is any dialect that of the old Scandinavian literature.
Feroe Isles.—Here the population is from Norway, as pure as that of Iceland; and the form of speech is Icelandic also. The popular songs of the Feroe Islanders have drawn considerable attention, and been well illustrated. They read the critic a lesson of caution, in showing the extent to which a foreign subject may be thoroughly naturalized; so much so as to wear the appearance of being indigenous. Yet the subjects are those of the Nibelungen-Lied, and, as such, continental in their origin; in their immediate origin, Scandinavian, in their remote origin, German.
Norway.—The population of Norway is essentially Lapp and Norwegian, with the addition of a few Kwain settlements.
The Norwegian calls the Lapplander a Fin, so that the district or march of the Lapp population of Norway is called Fin-mark. But it is found considerably southwards as well.
The following table shows the distribution of the Fin (Lapp) population of Norway in 1724, 1845, and four intermediate periods:—
1724. | 1756. | 1768. | 1825. | 1835. | 1845. | |
Finmark | 2825 | 3210 | 3260 | - | - | 12,506 |
Nordland | 3928 | - | - | - | - | 1735 |
North Trondjem | 478 | - | - | - | - | 181 |
South Trondjem | - | - | - | - | - | 75 |
Hedemarken[20] | - | - | - | - | - | 41 |
No census was taken for the years and districts to which no number is assigned. The table, however, invalidates the current notion that all the so-called savage races are in a state of decrease.
In the copper districts of the north of Norway there is a considerable number of Kwain settlers, chiefly employed as steady and industrious labourers in the mines. There is also a Kwain colony in the districts of Soloers called Finskoven (the Fin Wood) in the southern part of Norway and on the frontier of Sweden.
The rest of the population is of the same Germanic origin as the Danes and Swedes; though purer than either. The recent and superadded elements are but few, German being the chief; and Bergen and Christiania being the towns where they are commonest. Of the Danish elements no account is taken; the two populations being so closely allied. Jewish blood is non-existent; owing to rigorous laws of exclusion, ill-assorted with the liberal constitution of the most republican government in Europe.
A Lapp population common to Russia and Norway is common to Sweden also; the districts in the last-named countries being called Lap-mark, and the population Lapps.
Populations more or less allied to the Lapps, covering the southward extension of the present Lapp area were originally the native population of both Sweden and Norway. This is generally admitted. So it is that the present Germanic populations are not aboriginal.
That the Swedes and Norwegians are the newest elements, and that certain Ugrians were the oldest, is undoubted. But it by no means follows that the succession was simple. Between the first and last there may have been any amount of intercalations. Was this the case? My own opinion is, that the first encroachments upon the originally Ugrian area of Scandinavia were not from the south-west, but from the south-east, not from Hanover but from Prussia and Courland, not German but Lithuanic, and (as a practical proof of the inconvenience of the present nomenclature) although not German, Gothic.
Sweden to the south of the Malar-See is called Goth-land. The opposite coast of Prussia and Courland was the land of the Gutt-ones, Goth-ones, or Gyth-ones; in the eyes of a German and in the German language, a Goth-land also. An island in the Baltic, midway, is called Goth-land as well. What is the natural inference from this? Surely, the close relationship of the three populations.
When the main argument rests upon some single fact of primary weight or importance, a single fact to which nothing of equal magnitude can be opposed, the neglect of subordinate details is excusable—at least, in a short work. If they come spontaneously, and are of a satisfactory character—well and good. They are no part of the leading argument.
In some cases, perhaps, it should be a matter of principle to abstain from them; for example, when the leading argument, although good in itself, is liable, either from its novelty or from the amount of previous opinions which it contradicts, to be undervalued. In such a case, the display of subsidiary minutiæ subtracts from its weight. They make it look weaker than it is; weak enough to require all the support that the skill of its author can devise. In deducing the Greeks from Italy, the relations between the Greek and Latin tongues, the great difficulty of explaining them otherwise than by a geographical continuity, and the equal difficulty of effecting this continuity by any of the ordinary means formed the palmary argument. Such details as fell in with this view were put down to gain (apposita lucro). They were also good against similar details on the opposite side. But they were ex abundanti—at least in the first instance. To have neglected them altogether would not have been too bold. To have paraded them unnecessarily would have subtracted from the value of the real argument.
A comparative depreciation of subsidiary details appears in the present question; wherein it is held that certain members of the Lithuanian family extended their area across the Baltic into parts of Scandinavia, and peopled the southern provinces of Sweden. These were the Goths of Gothland, the Jutes of Jutland, the Vites of Withesleth, the old name of the Danish islands, anterior to their occupation by the Danes. The critic who doubts whether the names are the same as that of the Goths, on the strength of the difference of form, is free to do so; but by doing so, he will only impugn a part of the present doctrine. That the Goths of Gothland are the Gothones, Guttones, or Gythini of the opposite coast of Prussia and Courland is the important inference; and that the appearance of identical or similar names on the opposite coasts of an inland sea of no considerable breadth is a phenomenon which, until it can be explained otherwise, must be presumed to denote ethnological affinity is the principle which supports it. Whether the Gothones of Courland were really and truly Lithuanian is a point upon which there may be a difference of opinion; but there should be no difference of opinion as to the explanation of the presence of Goths in the opposite country of Gothland. The common-sense view of the matter, and the ordinary habits of interpretation should take their course.
This may be admitted, and yet an objection be taken to the effect that the Goths of the southern Gothland (the Goth-ones, Gyth-ini, Gutt-ones) were not Lithuanic but German. The primary argument on this point lies in the undoubted fact of the Goths of the Lower Danube, in the third and fourth centuries, being German.
But this primary argument is considerably invalidated by the fact, too often overlooked, of those Germans having been known under the name of Goths only when they have settled in the country of the Getæ and Gaudæ, a fact which makes the name just as foreign to the Teutonic dialects as Briton was to the Anglo-Saxon. From which it follows that all other populations which were, in respect to their name, in the same predicament as the Goths of Alaric and Theodoric, were connected not with the German invaders, but with the occupants of the country invaded; just as the Bretons of Brittany are connected not with such Englishmen as call themselves patriotically and poetically “Britons,” but with the Welsh representatives of the original occupants of the Keltic island Britannia. Now the populations thus linked together by some such name as G-th, G-t, J-t,[21] and V-t (all of which have been admitted to be but different forms of the same word) are numerous; three of them being now before us.
The real Goths, like the real Britons, were something very different from their German conquerors.
But the Gothic historian Jornandes, deduces the Goths of the Danube first from the southern coasts of the Baltic, and ultimately from Scandinavia. I think, however, that whoever reads his notices will be satisfied that he has fallen into the same confusion in respect to the Germans of the Lower Danube and the Getæ whose country they settled in, as an English writer would do who should adapt the legends of Geoffroy of Monmouth respecting the British kings to the genealogies of Ecbert and Alfred or to the origin of the warriors under Hengist. The legends of the soil and the legends of its invaders have been mixed together.
Nor is such confusion unnatural. The real facts before the historian were remarkable. There were Goths on the Lower Danube, Germanic in blood, but not Germanic in name; the name being that of the older inhabitants of the country. There were Gothones, or Guttones, in the Baltic, the essential part of whose name was Goth-; the -n- being, probably, and almost certainly, an inflexion.
Thirdly, there were Goths in Scandinavia, and Goths in an intermediate island of the Baltic. With such a series of Goth-lands, the single error of mistaking the old Getic legends for those of the more recent Germans (now called Goths), would easily engender others; and the most distant of the three Gothic areas would naturally pass for being the oldest also. Hence, the deduction of the Goths of the Danube from the Scandinavian Gothland.
The exception, then, to the Lithuanic origin of the Gothlander, which lies in the application of the name Goth to a population undoubtedly Germanic, is itself exceptionable; and the common-sense interpretation of the existence of similarly designated populations on the opposite coasts of an inland sea must take its course.
The exact degree to which Jornandes confounded the German invaders with the original Goths is uncertain. Some of his facts are unequivocally Getic, as his notice of Zamolxis. Others are as truly Germanic. The name Hermanric is this.
Each, however, is an extreme instance, and it is only at its extremities that the question is easy. In my own mind, I think that Getic legends and Getic history is the rule, Germanic the exception; in other words, that the so-called Gothic history is the history of the indigenæ rather than that of the invaders of the soil. It is even likely that Hermanric’s empire was German only as the present Austrian empire is German, i.e., German in respect to its chief. Zengis-Khan’s was Mongolian in the same way, the mass of his subjects and major part of his area being Turk. What leads to this is the likelihood of even the names of the royal families amongst the Ostrogoths and Visigoths—Amalung and Baltung—being Lithuanic. They have every appearance of having arisen out of eponymias. At any rate it is a strange coincidence to find one of the localities of the amber-district called sometimes Abalus, and sometimes Baltia—the latter name being connected with the Belt and Baltic. Pliny (writes Prichard) “in giving an account of the production of amber says, that, according to Pytheas, there was an estuary of the ocean called Mentonomon, inhabited by the Guttones, a people of Germany. It reached six thousand furlongs in extent. From this place an island named Abalus was distant about one day’s sail, on the shore of which the waves throw up pieces of amber. The inhabitants make use of it for fuel, or else sell it to their neighbours the Teutones.” Pliny says that Timæus gave full credit to this story, but that “he called the island not Abalus, but Baltia.”
Out of this Abal-, and this Balt-, I believe the eponymic names of Abal-ung (Amal-ung and Balt-ung) grew, just as Hellen did out of Hellas. And that they were other than German is shown by Tacitus, since the amber country was the country of the Æstyii, whose language was Britannicæ proprior—Britannicæ meaning Prussian, as I have shown elsewhere.
In bringing within the same class all the population denominated Gothini, Gothones, Guttones, Gothi, Gautæ, Gaudæ, Getæ, Jutæ, and Vitæ, I only do what nine out of ten of my predecessors have done before me. I differ, however, from them in determining the character of the class by that of the Guttones of the amber country, instead of that of the Goths of Alaric and Theodoric—these last being Goths only as the English are Britons, or the Spaniards, Mexicans. At the same time I am fully aware that any evidence whatever showing that the Germans of the Lower Danube were called Goths anterior to their arrival in the land of the Getæ, would shake my doctrine, and that unexceptionable evidence would throw it to the ground altogether.
The theory of the Scandinavian populations is different for the three different kingdoms.
1. Norway.—Norway agrees with Sweden in the likelihood of its earliest population having been Ugrian—Ugrian of the Lapp type, and continued southwards from Lapland or Finmark. Upon these the ancestors of the present Norwegians encroached.
2. Sweden.—In Norway the Germanic population came in immediate contact with the Ugrian; in Sweden it was, to a great extent, preceded by one from Courland and Prussia—the Goths. Hence, the ethnological elements in Sweden are one degree more complex.
3. Denmark.—Denmark differs from both Norway and Sweden in respect to its primary population; inasmuch as it is bounded on the north by the sea, so that its relations to the Ugrian area of the aboriginal Scandinavia are those of an island.
Does this prevent us from assuming a continuity of population? I cannot say. Although the north of Jutland is separated by a considerable breadth of water from the south of Scandinavia, Sealand is within sight of the southwestern coast of Sweden, and the south-western population of Sweden might easily have been extended into Denmark. On the other hand, however, the population which occupied the neck of the Chersonesus may with equal, if not greater reason, be considered to have been continued northward. But this population is itself complex, for instead of belonging to a single stock, we find, at the beginning of the historical period, Germans on the western, and Slavonians on the eastern half of Holstein. Which of these populations was continued into the Cimbric Chersonese? Or was there a third stock different from either? Or did each fill up a portion of the area, and if so, in what proportions? My own opinion in respect to these complexities is, that originally the southern half (at least) of the Cimbric Chersonese was Slavonic, even as the Mecklenburg and Lauenburg frontiers were Slavonic; and that, subsequently, a twofold displacement set-in—the Vitæ having invaded the islands and the north-eastern parts of Jutland from Prussia and Courland by sea, and the Frisians having pressed forwards from the Lower Elbe by land. Still, it would be hazardous to assert, that, during those primitive periods, when the whole of Norway and Sweden were Ugrian—as they, once, unquestionably were—the Danish Isles and the Cimbric Chersonese were not Ugrian also. It would be hazardous even to pronounce that the whole of the southern coast of the Baltic was not Ugrian also—since both the Slavonic populations of Mecklenburg and Pomerania, and the Lithuanians of Prussia and Courland belonged to the encroaching divisions of our species. That a Ugrian population extended as far southward and westward as the Elbe is a doctrine that may be maintained without going to the full recognition of the so-called Finnic hypothesis; which carries the populations akin to the Ugrian as far south as the Pyrenees, and sees in the Basques of Biscay and the Lapps of Lapland, the fragments of a vast population once continuous, but, subsequently, broken up and displaced by the Keltic and Germanic occupancies of Gaul and Germany respectively.
The history of the present Scandinavians, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians—must be considered in respect to (1) the line of conquest; (2) the date of the invasion; (3) the amount of foreign blood introduced.
1. Ptolemy’s notice of Scandia is, that “the western parts are occupied by the Chadeinoi, the eastern by the Phauonai and Phiræsoi, the southern by the Gautæ and Daukiônes, the middle by the Leuônoi.”—Lib. 11. ii. 33. We are not in the habit of considering these Phiræsoi to be Frisii, yet it would be difficult to give a reason against doing so. The Frisian occupancy of Jutland, at an early period, is undoubted, and it is equally undoubted that, of all the German dialects, the Frisian is the likest to the Scandinavian.
It is on the eastern side of Norway that these Phiræsoi must be placed, probably to the south of the Miösen, where they came in contact with the Chad-einoi of Hede-marken. There is a little forcing of the geography here. The Goths were, at the same time, in possession of the south of Sweden. These Goths seem to have been harder to reduce than the Ugrians, so that the line of the Frisian (Phiræsian) conquest ran, at first, from south to north, but afterwards changed its direction, and effected the reduction of the parts between the southern border of Lapland and the Malar Lake; the Goths of Gothland being the last to be reduced.
What justifies these details? The Goths of Gothland have already been considered. They reached as far as the parts about Stockholm. Now, North of these come the men of the South, i.e., of Suder-mannaland, or Suder-mania; a name which is explained if we make them the most southern of the invaders from Norway, but not easily explicable otherwise. This is the case of our own county of Suther-land repeated; which was the most southern part of Norway, though the most northern part of Britain. Further details of distribution are necessary to account for the name of the province of Westmannaland nearly, but not quite, on the eastern coast of Sweden. The district between it and the sea was reduced first.
2. The date must have been earlier than the time of Ptolemy; indeed, early enough to allow for the development of the differences between the Norse and Frisian languages. Reasons for believing that this requires no inordinate length of time I have given elsewhere.[22]
3. The intermixture of blood, and, consequently, the purity of the present stock, I believe to have varied with the different populations with which the Germanic invaders came in contact. Although both the Lapp and Kwain (i.e., the Laplander and the Finlander) are Ugrian, there is this important difference in respect to their relations to the Swedes and Norwegians. The Kwain and Scandinavian intermarry; the Lapp and Scandinavian do not. Hence we infer that in proportion as the original Ugrians of the southern and central parts of Scandinavia approached the Lapp type, displacement and extermination was the rule, intermixture the exception; whereas, on the other hand, the natives of the Kwain type may have amalgamated with their invaders. If so, the present Scandinavian stock is pure or mixed in proportion as the area it occupied was Lapp or Kwain. The details of this question are difficult. As a rough rule, however, we may say that the basis becomes less and less Ugrian as we proceed northwards; inasmuch as the type became more and more Lapponic, and the Germanic intermixture less and less.
The Gothlanders from the first were, probably, half-bloods, i.e., Ugrian on the mother’s side, as the invasion was maritime. The extent to which they are, at present, Germanic in blood as well as language, is uncertain.
The Goths from Prussia effected settlements in Sweden, why not also the Kwains of Finland? I think I find traces of their having done so in the name Anger-man-land, or Angria, which can scarcely be supposed to resemble the name of the Inger-man-land or Ingria, on the Gulf of Finland, by accident. But what if the name were not native, as I think it was not? In that case it is Goths who give it—both to the Ingrians and the Angrians. If so, Gothland must, at one time, politically, at least, have reached as far as 64° north latitude, the parallel of Angermania.
But the name may have been a common rather than a proper one, and have meant simply the March. If so, a Kwain settlement is unnecessary, and Anger-manna-land=the Land of the men of the frontier, that frontier being Lapp. If so, Lapp-mark is its Swedish equivalent.
RUMELIA.—THE TURK STOCK.—ZONES OF CONQUEST.—EARLY INTRUSIONS OF TURK POPULATIONS WESTWARD.—THRACIANS.—THE ANCIENT MACEDONIANS.—THE PELASGI OF MACEDONIA.—BOSNIA, HERZEGOVNA AND TURKISH CROATIA.—BULGARIA.
THE European population of the Ottoman Empire, laying aside Jews, Armenians, and other similarly non-indigenous populations, is fivefold—Turk, Greek, Slavonic, Rumanyo, and Albanian. The Albanian, however, it was necessary to consider in the first chapter.
Rumelia, the province which first comes into notice is, the true and proper area of the Turks, Ottomans, or Osmanlis; a family which, considered in respect to European ethnology, is as unimportant from its numerical magnitude, as it is recent in respect to its introduction. Yet this is a fact which we are slow to perceive at first; since the Turkish empire is so great, that, unless we separate its ethnological from its political elements, we fail to realize the extent to which the Osmanlis are not only intrusive, but inconsiderable. It is only in one of its provinces that the number of the Osmanli conquerors so nearly approaches that of the original Europeans, to give them the appearance of the natural occupants of the country; this being the province in question, coinciding, as nearly as possible, with the Valley of the ancient Hebrus, or the modern Maritza. It is a wide and fruitful plain, that Nature, perhaps, meant for tillage, but which the pastoral habits of its possessors have kept a grazing country. It is a plain, with the exception of the small mountain ridges on each side—the Despoto-Dagh and the Stanches-Dagh—a point worth remembering, because its physical conditions determine the probable permanence of its earlier populations—populations which, in all impracticable countries, are likely to have held their own in the mountains, and to have retreated before an invader in the plains.
As A.D. 1458 is the date of the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II. it may also pass for the date of the commencement of the Osmanli sway in Europe, and the Osmanli preponderance in the particular occupation of the province of Rumelia; for the time, in short, when ancient Thrace became Turkish. But the preliminaries had been going on for some time before, and it was as early as A.D. 1360 that the Hellespont was crossed by Amurath I. Till then, the Osmanli belonged to Asia Minor, Anatolia, or Roum, as it was called from the declining power of the degenerate Romans of Constantinople. But they were not indigenous even there; since Roum or Anatolia was a conquered country, even as Rumelia was—conquered, too, from the same degenerate and fictitious Romans. Hence the stream of Ottoman blood that passed from Asia to Europe was by no means pure. The occupancy of Asia Minor was not the work of a day; on the contrary, the process of appropriation was upwards of four centuries in duration; since the conquest of the race of Seljuk began in A.D. 1074. And this again was an extension of frontier from Persia; and Persia was never truly Turk. The stream that spread and wasted itself in Europe is not discovered at its fountain-head until we have traced it from Rumelia to Anatolia, from Anatolia to Persia, and from Persia to either Turkistan or further. Then, indeed, we find amongst the most southern members of the great Turk stock, amongst those whose blood has been most mixed, and amongst those who are farthest from the country of the Mongols of Mongolia, the great great ancestors of the family and followers of Othman.
It must be remembered that all the recorded movements that thus brought a conquering population from the Oxus to the Hebrus were military—marches of armies consisting of hosts of warriors. That anything approaching a national migration wherein the females bore a reasonable proportion to the males ever took place in Turkish ethnology has not been shown; so that, on the mother’s side, the Osmanli must, in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred, be other than Turk—sometimes Persian, sometimes Armenian, sometimes Georgian or Circassian, sometimes Anatolian (for some such adjective is required to denote the population of Asia Minor), sometimes European—and when European, Greek, Wallachian, Albanian, or Slavonic.
I have enlarged upon this because the majority of the travellers who, in Independent Tartary, Siberia, Turcomania, or Bokhara, meet with the other members of the Turk stock, in their original homes, are struck by the extent to which they differ in physiognomy from the Osmanli or Ottoman of Europe. They are often smooth-skinned and beardless, glabrous and glaucous, with high-cheek bones and oblique eyes, and other similar characteristics of the Mongol. The inference from this has, too often, been the wrong way; and an infusion of Mongolian blood been presumed. The truth is, that it is the Turks of Europe that have been modified; at any rate, it is only with the European that an intermixture of blood at all proportionate to the differences of physical conformation can be shown as an historical fact.
As a general rule the Osmanli prefers pastoral to agricultural employment, and dominant idleness to either. There is a reason for his preference to flocks and herds rather than to corn and tillage. His own proper and original area, the parts to the east and north of the Caspian, is a steppe, fitted for the nomad, but unfitted for the husbandman. Here, and here only, he has not been an intruder and a conqueror. Here, and here only, has he been without a subject population to work for him. This he has in Europe, this he has in Bokhara, this he has in Egypt; so that his love for looking-on and enjoying the labour of others is what he shares with the rest of the world, whereas his preference of a shepherd’s life to a cultivator’s is a habit rather than instinct. In the few parts of the original Turk area, where the conditions of soil and climate are favourable to agriculture, and where he is no dominant lord, but only an ordinary occupant, the Turk is as good a farmer as the generality. If he be not so in Asia Minor it is due to the insecurity of the fruits of his industry. On the other hand, in the valley of the Gurgan (falling into the Caspian from the east) the pre-eminently Turk branch of the Goklan Turcomans is mainly employed upon agriculture—growing grain and rearing silkworms. This, it may be said, is a singular instance. It is so; but where, besides, does any member of the great Turk stock come under the conditions necessary for agricultural industry—a fit soil and climate, combined with security of possession, and the absence of a subject and inferior class? Like any other fact, however isolated, it sets aside the current notion of the unfitness of the Turk for regular and industrial labour; a habitude, which, like so many other points of ethnology, is connected with external circumstances far more than blood, pedigree, or race.
The intellectual development of the Turk stock in general has been that of the majority of the families of mankind—moderate, or less than moderate; for invention and originality are the exceptions rather than the rule. And here they are in the same predicament as they were in respect to their industry. In their original country they are far removed from the contact of any literature or science better than their own; for what are the models for the Turk of Independent Tartary? In the country of their conquests they have clever Greeks and Arabs to do their head-work for them. And we may add to these drawbacks, the unfavourable effects of their creed. The language that gave them the Koran can give them nothing useful for the Europe of the nineteenth century; whilst the Europe of the nineteenth century is, in their eyes, a Europe of infidels.
However much we may lament the bigotry, ignorance, and sensuality of the Osmanli, he is only what his creed, conquests, and other unfortunate conditions make him. Of the hardy and simple families of the world, as opposed to the effeminate and subtle, he belongs to the most typical. This is shown in his history. Of the material conquerors of the world, of the disturbers of things physical by physical force, the Turks are the greatest: since what they have won has been by hardihood of will and strength of arm far less than by diplomacy or the more indirect effects of their arts and literature—of which, indeed, they have had none. But because they have been thus material, they have not been permanent. Had they conquered, like the ancient Romans, Egypt and Barbary and Servia and Persia and Hindustan would be Turk, giving an area greater than that of the Anglo-Saxons or the Slavonians. Still, they are the great material conquerors of history.
Yet this is but a result of certain physical and geographical conditions:—no proof of any specific hardihood of nature. It is no fanciful imagination to say, that the areas of the great conquering nations of the world, are as definitely bounded by certain lines of latitude as are those of climate; and that such areas give us zones of conquest and subjugation as truly as the Temperate or the Frigid give us zones of climate. There are a priori reasons for this; and there are proofs of it in every page of history. The effects of a northern latitude are to stunt the population, after the fashion of the Laplander; those of the tropics to enervate. Between these extremes the peoples that are at once hardy and well-grown strike, as with a two-edged sword, both upwards and downwards, north and south. The Germans, Slavonians, Turks, and Algonkins verify this. Sometimes a superior civilization, sometimes undeveloped energies, referable to some new influences, counteract this natural disposition (one of the nearest approaches to a law in ethnology) but the general rule is, as has been stated,—apparent exceptions, as are the Romans and Arabians.
The Turks pressed forward in the direction of Europe, even as the Sarmatians did towards India, earlier than they have the credit of doing. The Skoloti have been already considered. But what do we find in the early history of Asia Minor? A mountain throughout the Turk area is Tagh or Dagh. The mountain from which the 10,000 Greeks saw the sea was Thekh-es. This, perhaps, is accidental. But who dwelt around it? The Skythini, the Anatolian equivalents to the Russian Skythæ. But this proves too much, since Skythæ was no native name, but one of Sarmatian origin, and, as such, indicative of Sarmatians in the parts about. Otherwise, how could it be used? These Sarmatians cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless, the name in the Anabasis of the king of the Paphlagonian neighbours of the Scythini, near the mountain Thekhes, is Korylas, and Kral is the Lithuanic for king. But king is a common, not a proper name. So is Zupan (=chief, lord, or superior) in the present Slavonic. Yet Gibbon speaks of Zupanus, as a king so-called, by certain Slavonians of the Middle Danube. All this may be accidental. Such accidents, however, are stranger than the facts which explain them away.
Ottomans, Greeks, Romans, Goths, and Slavonians have all modified the original blood of Thrace; yet the present blood of Ottoman Rumelia is, probably, more Thracian than aught else, Thracian on the mothers’ side.
The old Thracian affinities are difficult; but not beyond investigation. A series of statements on the part of good classical authors tell us, that the Daci were what the Getæ were, and the Thracians what the Getæ; also, that the Phrygians spoke the same language as the Thracians, and the Armenians as the Phrygians. If so, either the ancient language of Hungary must have been spoken as far as the Caspian, or the ancient Armenian as far as the Theiss. Many facts are against this: indeed the evidence must be dealt with by attributing two languages to Phrygia, one approaching the nearest tongue on the East, which would be the Armenian, and another standing in the same relation to the Thracian, on the west. This distinction being drawn, the rest is probable.
The evidence as to there having been members of the Thracian stock on both sides the Hellespont, is not limited to the Phrygians of Mysia. The Bithyni and others are in the same category. Which way was the migration? It is generally believed to have been from Asia to Europe; but the deduction of the Greeks from Italy, and that of the Sanskrit language from Europe, modifies this view. In truth, the present writer reads the whole history of Thrace backwards; seeing in the majority of the populations akin to the Thracians on the eastern side of the Hellespont signs of European intrusion. Signs, too, of European intrusion he sees in the world-wide tale of Troy; the historical basis of the great Homeric poems being not the struggle between the Greek and the Asiatic, but that between the Greek and Thracian, each fighting for a footing in Asia Minor. Perhaps the beginning of the Greek colonization was the end of the Sarmatian; for the ancient Thracians I believe to have belonged to this stock. Like the Lithuanians of the Cimmerian Bosphorus, they have effected their share of achievements in India; their conquests having been Bacchic, Thracian, and Slavonic, just as the Cimmerian inroads were Lithuanic. So that there was a double origin to the so-called Indo-Europeans of Hindostan and Persia; a trace of which may possibly,—I do not say probably—exists at the present moment in the name Jat.[23]
Between the original Thracian basis and the present dominant population of Osmanlis, there have been the following elements of intermixture: Pelasgic (whatever that was), Semitic, Hellenic, Roman, Gothic, Slavonic, and Bulgarian.
So far as the Macedonians were other than Hellenic, they were either Skipetar or Slavonian, i.e., in the category of the ancient Albanians, or in the category of the ancient Thracians; or they may have been mixed in some unascertained manner. Even if we suppose them to have pressed southwards and eastwards from the head-waters of the Axius, and from the southern boundary of Servia, a place for them in the same great class with the Thracians is admissible; and, in all probability, southern Servia was their original locality. That they, too, pressed forwards in Asia is likely. That words so radically alike as Mygdon-es and Macedon-es, are wholly unconnected, and that they resemble each other by accident, is what I am slow to believe; but that the line of demarcation between the Thracians and Macedonians is broad and trenchant for members of the same stock, is likely, since each was an encroaching population, and, as such, a population which obliterated transitional and intermediate varieties.
It is well known that of the three localities of the Pelasgian stock, known under that name within the period of authentic history, two are in Macedonia: one of these we get from Herodotus, the other from Thucydides.
1. Herodotus mentions the Pelasgi of Khreston—above the Tyrsênians.
2. Thucydides, those of Cleonæ, Dium, and Olophyxus on the peninsula of Mount Athos.
The Pelasgi of the third locality, the Asiatic Pelasgi, or the Herodotean Pelasgi of the parts about Plakia and Skylake, near Cyzicus, may reasonably be considered as settlers of comparatively recent origin, both from the general phenomena of ethnological distribution, and the most scientific interpretation of the few data we possess for the ancient ethnology of Asia Minor.
But the Pelasgi of Chreston and Mount Athos, are in localities wherein they may as easily be aboriginal as intrusive. Which were they? I cannot make up my mind; I can only exhaust the two alternatives. If aboriginal, they were one of three things, Skipetar, Slavonic, or members of an extinct stock; if intrusive, members of some extinct stock, Asiatic or Italian. How they may have been, this is easily understood.
1. An eastern extension of the oldest Skipetar area would carry a population akin to the ancestors of the present Albanians as far as the Ægean.
2. A southern extension of the Thracian area would carry the ancient Thracian stock as far as Thessaly.
3. Semitic, or other Asiatic colonies, would give us a series of maritime settlements.
4. So would a series of very early Italian colonizations. These we may deduce from some part of Italy, different from the mother-country of the true Hellenic Greeks; and we may, also, assume a difference in the date of the movement. In such a case the Pelasgi may have been Hellenic, as the Anglo-Saxons were Scandinavian; in other words, out of two Italian colonizations one (the Pelasgic) may have been the analogue to the Angle, the other (the Hellenic) to the Danish invasion of Britain.
Of these alternatives I prefer the second and fourth to the first and third.
The name itself seems to have been applied to one stock only, not to several—though the evidence of this is by no means conclusive.
It seems not to have been native. Native names are, usually, more specific and less general. It was a name which A gave to B, not one which B gave itself.
It seems to have been originally other than Greek.
With a strong inclination to see in the Œnotrian conquest of Greece a third rather a second stream of population, and with the belief that the earliest displacement of the original Skipetar population was effected by movements from Thrace and Macedon (by members of the great Slavonic stock), the Greek occupancy being later than this; favouring, too, the idea that the Pelasgi of Macedon were, at one and the same time, indigenous to the soil, and members of the same stock as the Thracians (the stock being the Slavonic); I am opposed to the broad line of demarcation which so many recent authors have drawn between the Hellenic civilization and the Thracian, a line of demarcation which has led them, in many cases, to explain away rather than admit the evidence of several good writers of antiquity, as to the influence of the Thracian music and the Thracian poetry on early Greece.
To claim for the Homeric poems the same amount of Thracian elements that the Welshman claims for those of the cycle of King Arthur, would be to illustrate the obscurum per obscurius, inasmuch as the Welshman’s claim is of a somewhat impalpable nature. It cannot attach to the poems themselves, in any known form. They are all in Norman-French, or German, or English, or Italian—none in Welsh. Neither are they translations of a Welsh original now lost. Neither is their subject-matter Welsh to the amount of one-third. Yet, the germ of the fiction is, in some way or other, Welsh, and the claim of the Welshman is, up to a certain point, valid.
Mutatis mutandis, let us ask whether the Trojan cycle may not, in the same sense, be Slavonic—assuming the Thracians to have belonged to that stock?
I. a. When we find the name of a non-historical person coincide with that of an historical people or an historical locality, it is a fair inference, all the world over, to consider that form as an epônymus.
b. It is also fair to connect such legends as attach to the name with the people or the locality.
c. Now several names in the early Greek epic cycles are thus eponymic—thus localized in Thracian and other similar localities—Teucer, Æneas, Dardanus, &c.
II. Again—the national poetry of the existing Slavonic nations, more nearly approaches—longo intervallo, I admit—that of the Homeric Greeks than does that of any other families of mankind.
III. The metres do the same.
IV. The Sanskrit metres are in the same category with the Slavonic; so that—the European origin of the Sanskrit being admitted—the similarity must be of great antiquity.
These points cannot be enlarged on. They form, however, the basis of some claim for the existence of Slavonic elements in the old heroic poetry of Greece; which—it must be remembered—originated on the Helleno-Slavonic debatable land of Æolic Asia.
The propounder of an hypothesis has no right to lay down, peremptorily, the laws by which his doctrine is to be tested. At the same time, he may fairly claim that the objections to it should rest on the same broad grounds on which it is based. The Homeric poems are Greek; and the Orlando Furioso is Italian. Yet there are Welsh and other non-Italian elements in the latter, and, it is submitted, that there are Slavonic and non-Hellenic elements in the former. Their amount I do not profess to measure.
Bosnia, Herzegovna, Turkish Croatia,—Slavonic in speech, and Slavonic in blood, the Bosnians and Herzegovnians differ from the Servians only in a few details—the chief being their Mahometan creed. Equally slight is the difference between the Turkish and Austrian Croatians.
Bulgaria is Slavonic and Rumanyo in speech, Mœsian, Gothic, Turk, and Slavonic in blood.
AUSTRIA.—BUKHOVINIA, GALLICIA, AND LODOMIRIA.—BOHEMIA AND MORAVIA.—AUSTRIAN SILESIA.—DALMATIA.—CROATIA.—CARNIOLA.—CARINTHIA.—STYRIA.—SALTZBURG, THE TYROL, THE VORARLBERG.—UPPER AND LOWER AUSTRIA.—HUNGARY.
Bukhovinia.—Bukhovinia was part of the ancient Dacia, and the bulk of the population is, consequently, Rumanyo.
A smaller portion is common to Bukhovinia and Gallicia, and this is chiefly Russniak, but partly Pole.
Gallicia and Lodomiria.—At present these are Russniak areas encroached upon by Poles and Germans: indeed, it was from Gallicia, Lodomiria, and Bukhovinia, that the Malorussians seem to have originated, and Russia to have been conquered.
Gallicia, however, at one time seems to have been occupied, more or less partially, by the most south-western members of the Lithuanic family—the Gothini of Tacitus, whose language is stated to have been Gallic. I have suggested, elsewhere, the likehood of this meaning Gallician—there being no reason to look upon that name as one of recent origin. More than this, without denying the existence of true Gauls on those several portions of the water-system of the middle Danube where they are placed by ancient writers under the name of Galatæ, I am inclined to believe that they were rather Gallician and Gallic.
For Gallicia to have been Lithuanic, Volhynia must have been Lithuanic[24] also, unless we suppose the Gothini to have been an isolated settlement; which, perhaps, they were.
Bohemia.—Whatever may be the inferences from the fact of Bohemia having been politically connected with the empire of the Germanic Marcomanni, whatever may be those from the element Boio-, as connecting its population with the Boii of Gaul and Bavaria (Baiovarii), the doctrine that the present Slavonic population of that kingdom—Tshekhs as they call themselves—is either recent in origin or secondary to any German or Keltic aborigines, is wholly unsupported by history. In other words, at the beginning of the historical period Bohemia was as Slavonic as it is now.
From A.D. 526 to A.D. 550, Bohemia belonged to the great Thuringian empire. The notion that it was then Germanic (except in its political relations) is gratuitous. Nevertheless, Schaffarik’s account is, that the ancestors of the present Tshekhs came, probably, from White Croatia: which was either north of the Carpathians, or on each side of them. According to other writers, however, the parts above the river Kulpa in Croatia sent them forth. In Bohemian the verb ceti=to begin, from which Dobrowsky derives the name Czekh=the beginners, the foremost, i.e. the first Slavonians who passed westwards. The powerful Samo, the just Krok, and his daughter, the wise Libussa, the founder of Prague, begin the uncertain list of Bohemian kings, A.D. 624-700. About A.D. 722, a number of petty chiefs become united under P’remysl, the husband of Libussa. Under his son Nezamysl, occurs the first Constitutional Assembly at Wysegrad; and in A.D. 845, Christianity was introduced. But it took no sure footing till about A.D. 966. Till A.D. 1471, the names of the Bohemian kings and heroes are Tshekh—Wenceslaus, Ottokar, Ziska, Podiebrad. In A.D. 1564, the Austrian connexion and the process of Germanizing began.
Now, in considering the heroic age of Tshekh literature, Schaffarik himself, though firmly holding the doctrine of a previous Germanic population, remarks, that “there is no trace of any remnant of the German spirit having survived in Bohemia. The remains of such Germanic population as there were, must have been a weak remnant, and soon have become lost in the Slavonic nationality. Even the stronger most probably withdrew to the lonely hills.”
Moravia.—The history and ethnology of Moravia is nearly that of Bohemia, except that the Marcomannic Germans, the Turks, Huns, Avars, and other less important populations may have effected a greater amount of intermixture. Both populations are Tshekh, speaking the Tshekh language—the language, probably, of the ancient Quadi.
Austrian Silesia.—The basis of the population is Sorabian, i.e. akin to the Srbie, and Serskie of Lusatia. Like Gallicia, however, it has become Polish in language wherever it is not German.
Dalmatia.—The bulk of the present population is Slavonic, closely allied to the Servians, Bosnians, Herzegovnians, and Montenegriners. The foreign elements, however, are considerable.
First came the Roman conquest; then the Avar; then Germanic, then Arab, and then Venetian influences. Besides this there were Mongol inroads, and an absolute conquest of the neighbouring countries of Bosnia and Herzegovna by the Turks.
In Dalmatia we have a Slavonic population addicted to maritime habits. The Liburnians of old, the Narentines, the Uskoks, the Almissans during the contests between Venice and the Turks are prominent in the history of piracy. On the other hand the history of more than one Republic—Ragusa, Poglizza—shows that the Dalmatian temper has not been dead to the spirit of political liberty.
Croatia is Slavonic nearly as Servia and Bosnia are Slavonic. The Croatian dialect, without the two being mutually unintelligible, differs from the so-called Illyrian of the Vinds, Slovenians, or Slovenzi of—
Istria, Carniola, Carinthia, and Styria, all truly Slavonic districts, though, of course, partially occupied by an encroaching population of Germans on the northern, and of Italians on the southern frontier.
Salzburg, the northern half of the Tyrol, and the Vorarlberg I believe to have been originally as Slavonic as Carinthia, and also that they are at the present moment Slavonic in blood, though German in language.
Upper and Lower Austria I believe to have been in the same predicament.
The southern half of the Tyrol had its affinities with the south rather than the north, and was originally, in part at least, Etruscan. It must be remembered that it by no means follows that because it was Etruscan it was necessarily other than Slavonic.
Hungary.—The complex ethnology of Hungary now remains for consideration.
The Banat is a mixture of recently introduced populations in the way of colonization.
Transylvania is German, Rumanyo and Sekler, a term which will be noticed hereafter.
The central parts only are Majiar—Majiar meaning the population which speaks the Majiar language, which originated in Asia, and which in the tenth century effected intrusions and conquests in Hungary, just as the Osmanlis did in Rumelia. The details of the Majiar movements from the Ural Mountains to the Danube are obscure. They are said, however, to have been driven from their own locality by the Petschenagi. They are also mentioned as having taken that part of Russia which is called Susdal, in their way.
Seven was the number of the names of their patriarchs, who where Almus, the father of Arpad, Eleud of Zobolsu, Cundu of Curzan, Ound of Ete,[25] Tosu of Lelu, Huba of Zemera, Tahut of Horca; but the tribes, clans, or generations were far more numerous. In one of the traditions they amount to one hundred and eight. In the genealogies themselves we can trace more than one family to a single patriarch, since the tribes of Calan and Consoy are derived from Ete, the son of Ound. In these divisions and subdivisions we see a far greater resemblance to an Asiatic than to a European state of society; indeed, we may easily imagine that it is Turks or Mongols that we are reading of.
I cannot find that they came to Europe accompanied by their wives and daughters. Their march was rapid, since it was game and fish that they subsisted on rather than on the produce of agriculture. “Every day they hunted, so that the Hungarians are skilful above other nations in the chase. By hunting and fishing they got their daily food.”
They are described as a people of excessive rudeness and cruelty. “The nation of the Hungarians, fiercer then any brute beast, killed but few with the sword, though many thousands with their arrows. These they shot from bows of horn with such skill that their blows could not be guarded against it. This mode of fighting was dangerous in proportion as it was novel. It was like that of the Britons, except that where the one used darts the other used arrows.”
The Majiars were darker-skinned than the Turks; such, at least, is the plain interpretation of the epithet black, which is applied to them by Nestor; who calls them the black Ugri (Ugri czerni) in contradistinction to the white Ugri (Ugri bjeli), by which he is supposed to mean the Khazars.
From about A.D. 889 to A.D. 955, the Majiars were the scourge of the countries along the Danube; and in Bavaria, Saxony, Thuringia, Franconia, Hesse, Alsatia, and even France, they fought battles with various success—at first as conquerors. Afterwards, however, the tide of success turned against them, and a signal victory near Merseburg, in A.D. 934, first broke their power, which was afterwards limited to their present area by a more decisive victory on the Lech in A.D. 955.
I have remarked upon the extent to which the division of the Majiars into tribes, families, clans, or generations, has a Turk or Mongol look; and I now add that it is possible that it may actually be so. There are numerous proofs of the presence of Turk tribes in Hungary—the three most, important of which are—1. The Avars; 2. The Petschenagi; and 3. The Kumanians.
This is no more than we expect: since there were not only the descendants of the Huns of Attila settled in the country, but several separate subsequent invasions from the east had occurred in the interval.
1. The Avars, for more than three centuries after the death of Attila, continued to be the chief population of Pannonia; a population engaged in perpetual wars with their neighbours in Croatia, Moravia, and Transylvania, and, frequently, extending their invasions to Bohemia, Germany, and even France. Whether they were the absolute descendants of the Huns of Attila, under a new name, or not, is unimportant; since, if they were not Huns in the strict sense of the term, they were a very closely allied population. I think they formed the bulk of the Pannonians during the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. But, as the strength of the Slavonians of Moravia, Upper Hungary, Croatia and Servia increased, the power of the Avars waned, and, weakened as they were at the time of the Majiar invasion, they lost their language and nationality and name soon after that event. Till then, however, they had a separate existence, though reduced in importance. In the time of Nestor the extinction of the Avars, whom the Russians call Obri, was indicated by the following bye-word,—“they are gone even as the Obri; neither kith nor kin remains.” Whether they were most amalgamated with the Slavonians or the Majiars is doubtful. Such Hun blood as runs in the veins of the present Hungarians is referable to the Avars; at least it is certain that unless we supposed the Huns of Attila to have remained in Hungary (Pannonia) under the name of Avar, we cannot well trace their continued existence in that country; besides which the words Hun and Avar, are frequently used as synonymous—“Huni qui et Avares dicuntur.”
2. The Petschenagi, a branch of the great Turk family, were, even in Asia, the nearest neighbours of the ancestors of the Majiars; their locality being the parts between the Jaik and the Uralian Mountains. Their invasion of Russia is placed by Nestor in A.D. 915; their settlements being the parts between the Lower Dnieper and the mouths of the Danube. We find them in Hungary under the name of Bisseni.
3. The Kumanians appear in Europe rather later than the Petschenagi and Majiars, i.e., in the latter half of the eleventh century. Volhynia is the country where they more especially settled. Like the Petschenagi they were Turk, but not Mahometan. On the contrary, they are described as unclean Pagans, who ate all sorts of meat, and some of it raw.
4. The fourth section of the Turk stock which made settlements in Hungary were the Khazars. I should not, however, like to assert positively that they were not Avars under another name, or, at any rate, a closely allied population.
5. The fifth were the Bulgarians. Without fixing the date of their advent, we may safely assume that it was subsequent to the conversion of some portion of the nation to Mahometanism, although previous to their adoption of the Slavonic language.
But the remarkable fact is the name of one of their leaders Heten,[26] a name which we see in the list of the proper Majiar patriarchs. This confirms the notion that the division into tribes and sub-tribes may have been less Majiar and more Turk than it seems to be.
The Bashkirs of Hungary are a difficult population. In the thirteenth century, the Arabian writer Jakut, writes that he found in the city of Aleppo some florid-faced Mahometans, who were called Bashkirs, and came from Hungary.
Now, the present Bashkirs are the occupants of those parts beyond the Uralian Mountains from which the Majiars came: their language being Turk. But, as there is satisfactory evidence that this is an adopted tongue, and that their original speech was Ugrian, they are reasonably supposed to represent in the thirteenth century, not the Majiars of Hungary, but the Majiars of the mother-country from which the invaders of Europe proceeded. If so, how came they to be Mahometans? Were they not rather the Bulgarians last mentioned? Their florid complexion is the chief fact against it. On the other hand, it must be remarked that though Jakut says that they were called Bashkirs (“audiebant Baschgardi”) he does not say that they called themselves so. Again, the number of their chiefs is seven—the number of the so-called Majiar patriarchs; amongst whom it must remembered we find the Bulgarian Heten.
Hence, of a Bashkir intermixture, separate from the Bulgarians on one side, and the Majiars on the other, there is no satisfactory evidence.
The analysis as far as it has proceeded has given us—
1. | Ugrians | Majiars. | |
2. | Turks | a. Huns. | |
” | b. Avars. | ||
” | c. Petschenagi. | ||
” | d. Kumanians. | ||
” | e. Khazars. | ||
” | f. Bulgarians, | ||
” | α. Pagan, | ||
” | β. Mahometan. |
The Majiar conquest converted a Turk into a Ugrian area: its date being the tenth century.
The Hun conquest converted a semi-romanized into a Turk area; its date being the fifth century. A.D. 444 is a convenient epoch for this event. It was the year of the murder of Attila’s brother, and the sole supremacy of Attila himself.
We will first ask how Attila left Hungary: next how he found it.
I am not at all satisfied with the reasons generally given for believing that, as his power fell to pieces at his death, so did the Hun blood in Hungary become extinct. Still less am I satisfied with the reasons which give any particular nation the credit of having destroyed it. The recovery of the province of Pannonia never took place. I cannot find that either the Goths of the Lower, or the Germans of the Upper, Danube made any permanent conquest. That the Slavonic tribes of the surrounding frontier pressed towards the interior is certain; but it is not certain that they ever made the country their own.
That the political power of the descendants of Attila was broken is certain; and for that very reason, I believe that the ethnological influence of the Huns remained. The son of Attila was not the king of the Huns, because Hun seems to have been a collective name, and, perhaps, was not a native one. But he was king of several of the populations in detail, of which, along with others, the Hun power was made. The tribes most ready to avail themselves of the death of Attila were the Goths of the Lower Danube—Bulgaria, and (perhaps) Servia. Now these first attacked the Setagæ of Lower Pannonia; and when Dinzic, the son of Attila knew of it he opposed them with the few tribes that still acknowledged his dominion, the Ultzinzures, the Angesuri the Bitugures, and the Bardones. All these were particular Hun populations, who, as long as the Hun power was at work on a large scale were merged in one general name, but who afterwards step forth as separate substantive members of that great confederacy, or empire.
Still there was great encroachment; the invading populations of the Avars and the Bulgarians—so far as they were not Huns—being like the Ultzinzures, &c. of Turk blood.
Before the remains of the Huns of Attila were extinguished—probably before they were notably diminished—the closely allied Avars (Huns, perhaps, under another name) conquered Pannonia, and held it from the end of the sixth to that of the eighth century.
What with the remains of Attila’s army, and what with the Avars and the Bulgarians, I think that when the Majiars entered Hungary they found it, at least, as much Turk as aught else,—as much, but not more; for the history of Hungary between the Hun and the Majiar conquests seems to have been as follows:—
a. There was some reaction on the part of the Romans, assisted by—
b. The Goths, and perhaps by—
c. The remains of the native population of the frontiers.
The Gepidæ, too, were amongst the subjects of Attila. After his death they rebelled against his son. Between the Danube, the Theiss, and the Carpathian Mountains, their power grew steadily until the rise of the Avars and Lombards; the union of which two nations was too strong for them. By the beginning of the eighth century their national existence had ceased.
I cannot say to what stock the Gepidæ belonged. I think they were Slavonians.
Be this, however, as it may, their power seems to have been in the inverse ratio to that of the Avars, and they must be admitted as an element in the ethnology of Hungary, without being supposed to be a very important one.
We may well, then, say that no European population is more heterogeneous than that of Hungary.
a. In the countries of Saala and Eisenberg we have a simple extension of the Carinthians.
b. In Upper Hungary the Slovaks.
c. On the Croatian frontier, Croatians—to say nothing about the political union of the two kingdoms.
d. In Slavonia, Servians and Russians—a variety of the Servian section.
e. The Banat has already been noticed. So has—
f. Transylvania. The non-Majiar populations of all these districts are separated from the Majiars by the outward and visible signs of difference of language; and their ethnology is, consequently, widely different from that of the Jaszag and Kunszag. Of these, though the former is Slavonic and the latter Turk, in blood, each is Majiar in language.
Different, however, from all are the Seklers. Their peculiarity is, that they were Majiars before the great Majiar invasion of the tenth century; Ugrians, probably, in the army of Attila, as they easily might have been, and as their own belief makes them, whilst a passage in Alfred mentions the Syssele east of the land of the Vends. The word means settler in Majiar, and it is only by supposing an early Majiar invasion that its presence in the pages of Alfred can be explained.
It is in language that the Majiar is distinct from the rest of Europe. In blood there is but little difference. That a Majiar female ever made her way from the Ural Mountains to Hungary is more than I can find; the presumptions being against it. Hence, it is just possible that a whole-blooded Majiar was never born on the banks of the Danube. Whether the other elements are most Turk or most Slavonic is more than I venture to guess.
* * * *
Why do I give a Sarmatian origin to the ancient populations of the Lower and Middle Danube? The details are too lengthy for exhibition; a sketch only can be given. Special testimony places the Thracians, the Getæ, the Daci, and the Triballi in the same class. The reasons in favour of the recent origin of the present Servians, Croatians, Carinthians, Slovaks, and Tshekhs, is inconclusive. The Jazyges of the Euxine were in the same category with the Jazyges of the Theiss, i.e. Slavonic. From these the intermediate populations cannot be separated.
But why carry the Slavonic area further west? In the Tyrol we have such geographical names as Scharn-itz, Gshnitz-thal, and Vintsh-gau; in the Vorarlberg, Ked-nitz and Windisch-matrei. Even where the names are less definitely Slavonic, the compound sibilant tsh, so predominant in Slavonic, so exceptional in German, is of frequent occurrence. This, perhaps, is little, yet is more than can be found in any country known to have been non-Slavonic. Besides which, there are no presumptions against the doctrine. Again—a Slavonic population in the Vorarlberg and Southern Bavaria best accounts for the name Vind-elicia.
* * * *
Malta, Crete, and several of the Greek Islands, are European in respect to their politics only. Ethnologically, they are African and Asiatic. In Malta the language of the common people is Arabic, and the blood is probably Arabic also—the superadded elements being numerous.
The aboriginal population of Crete is problematical. If we admit the reasonable presumption that it was an extension of that of the Continent, Egypt and Phœnicia have each a claim; as has Greece. That Minos represents a different person—historical or mythological—from Menes is a current doctrine; but then the notion that any amount of similarity of name may occur within improbably narrow limits both of space and time is current also.
Hence, Egyptian, Phœnician, Anatolian, and perhaps other earlier elements are to be attributed to Crete anterior to the period of its Hellenization. Of the subsequent elements the Arabic is the most important. In each and all, too, of the other isles, the basis is non-Hellenic.
I have no opinion as to the original blood of Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic isles. The last are Spanish in speech, the other two Italian, Arabic elements having been superadded—those introduced by the Roman conquest, and by the Phœnician having preceded them.
* * * *
If the ethnological analyses of the preceding pages be true, the extent to which the phenomena of what is called race are liable to over-valuation is considerable; so rare and exceptional is any approach to pure blood, and so little do pedigree and nationality coincide. The most powerful nations are the most heterogeneous. Yet the inference that mixture favours social development would be as unsafe as the exaggeration of the effects of purity. The conditions which are least favourable for a prominent place in the world’s history are the best for the preservation of old characters. The purest populations of Europe are the Basques, the Lapps, the Poles, and the Frisians; yet who can predicate any important character common to them all?
To attribute national aptitudes and inaptitudes or national predilections and antipathies to the unknown influences of blood, as long as the patent facts of history and external circumstances remain unexhausted, is to cut the Gordian Knot rather than to untie it. That there is something in pedigree is probable; but, in the mind of the analytical ethnologist, this something is much nearer to nothing than to everything.
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THE POWERS OF THE CREATOR DISPLAYED IN THE CREATION; or, Observations on Life amidst the various forms of the Humbler Tribes of Animated Nature: with Practical Comments and Illustrations. By Sir John Graham Dalyell, Knt. and Bart. In 2 volumes, containing numerous Plates of living subjects, finely coloured. Vol. 1, comprehending Seventy Plates, 4to., price 4l. 4s.
ENGLAND BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 16mo. cloth, 2s. 6d.
INSTRUMENTA ECCLESIASTICA. Edited by the Ecclesiological, late Cambridge Camden Society. Second Series. Parts 4 and 5, each 2s. 6d.
TRANSACTIONS OF THE MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. Royal 8vo., Vol. III. Part 2, 10s.
INSECTA SAUNDERSIANA: or, Characters of Undescribed Insects in the Collection of Wm. Wilson Saunders. Diptera, Part 2. By Francis Walker, F.L.S. 8vo., 3s.
THE PHYTOLOGIST. Nos. 116 to 127. 1s. each.
THE ZOOLOGIST. Nos. 97 to 108. 1s. each.
A HISTORY OF BRITISH CRUSTACEA. By Thomas Bell, Sec.R.S., F.L.S., F.Z.S., &c., Professor of Zoology in King’s College, London. Part 7, price 2s. 6d., or royal 8vo., 5s.
A HISTORY OF BRITISH MOLLUSCA AND THEIR SHELLS. By Professor Edward Forbes, F.R.S., and Sylvanus Hanley, B.A., F.L.S. Parts 35 to 42. 8vo., 2s. 6d. plain, or royal 8vo. coloured, 5s. each.
The two last enumerated Works are in continuation of the series of “British Histories,” of which the Quadrupeds and Reptiles, by Professor Bell; the Birds and Fishes, by Mr. Yarrell; the Birds’ Eggs, by Mr. Hewitson; the Starfishes, by Professor Forbes; the Zoophytes, by Dr. Johnston; the Trees, by Mr. Selby; and the Fossil Mammals and Birds, by Professor Owen, are already published. Each Work is sold separately, and is perfectly distinct and complete in itself.
A FAMILIAR INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF POLARIZED LIGHT; with a Description of, and Instructions for Using, the Table and Hydro-Oxygen Polariscope and Microscope. By Charles Woodward, F.R.S. Illustrated by numerous Wood Engravings. Second Edition, 8vo., 3s.
HINTS ON THE HISTORY AND MANAGEMENT OF THE HONEY BEE. By Edward Bevan, M.D. 12mo. sewed, 6d.
A DESCRIPTION OF THE BAR AND FRAME-HIVE, invented by W. Augustus Munn, Esq., with an Abstract of Wildman’s Complete Guide for the Management of Bees throughout the Year. 8vo. sewed, 2s. 6d.
A SUPPLEMENTARY CATALOGUE OF THE BRITISH TINEIDÆ AND PTEROPHORIDÆ. By H. T. Stainton. 8vo. sewed, 2s.
PUBLISHED PREVIOUSLY TO 1851.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF ARTS AND MANUFACTURES. By Arthur Aikin, F.L.S., F.G.S., &c. In foolscap 8vo., Illustrated, 8s. cloth.
AN ELEMENTARY COURSE OF GEOLOGY, MINERALOGY, AND PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. By David T. Ansted, M.A., F.R.S., Professor of Geology, King’s College, London, &c. Post 8vo. illustrated, price 12s. Also by Professor Ansted,
THE ANCIENT WORLD; or, Picturesque Sketches of Creation. With 149 Illustrations. A New Edition, post 8vo., 10s. 6d.
THE GEOLOGIST’S TEXT BOOK. Foolscap 8vo., 3s. 6d.
THE GOLD SEEKER’S MANUAL. Foolscap 8vo., 3s. 6d.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE, and a South Sea Whaling Voyage. By Thomas Beale. Post 8vo., 12s.
A HISTORY OF BRITISH REPTILES. By Professor Bell, Sec. R.S., F.L.S., F.G.S. Second Edition, with 50 Wood Engravings. 8vo., 12s. Also by Professor Bell,
A HISTORY OF BRITISH QUADRUPEDS, including the Cetacea. Nearly 200 Illustrations, 8vo., 28s.
THE HONEY BEE; its Natural History, Physiology, and Management. By Edward Bevan, M.D. A New Edition, 12mo., with many Illustrations, 10s. 6d.
A TREATISE ON THE MANAGEMENT OF FRESH-WATER FISH, with a view to making them a Source of Profit to Landed Proprietors. By Gottlieb Boccius. 8vo. 5s. And by the same Author,
A TREATISE ON THE PRODUCTION AND MANAGEMENT OF FISH IN FRESH WATERS, by Artificial Spawning, Breeding, and Rearing: showing also the Cause of the Depletion of all Rivers and Streams. 8vo. 5s.
A GEOGRAPHICAL AND COMPARATIVE LIST OF THE BIRDS OF EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA. By Charles Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino. 8vo. 5s.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF INSTINCT, deduced from the Habits of British Animals. By Jonathan Couch, F.L.S., Member of the Royal Geological Society and of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, &c. Post 8vo., 8s. 6d.
JOHN VAN VOORST, 1, PATERNOSTER ROW.
WORKS PUBLISHED BY MR. VAN VOORST.
THE ISLE OF MAN; its History, Physical, Ecclesiastical, Civil, and Legendary. By the Rev. J. G. Cumming, M.A., F.G.S., Vice-Principal of King William’s College, Castletown. Post 8vo., Illustrated with Views and Sections, 12s. 6d.
RARE AND REMARKABLE ANIMALS OF SCOTLAND, Represented from Living Subjects: with Practical Observations on their Nature. By Sir John Graham Dalyell, Bart. 2 vols. 4to., containing 109 Coloured Plates, 6l. 6s.
FIRST STEPS TO ANATOMY. By James L. Drummond, M.D., Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Belfast Royal Institution. With 12 Illustrative Plates. 12mo. 5s.
A HISTORY OF BRITISH STARFISHES, and other Animals of the Class Echinodermata. By Professor Ed. Forbes, F.R.S., F.L.S., F.G.S. 8vo., with more than 120 Illustrations, 15s., or Royal 8vo., 30s.
TRAVELS IN LYCIA, MILYAS, AND THE CIBYRATIS, in Company with the late Rev. E.T. Daniell. By Professor Forbes and Capt. T. A. B. Spratt, R.N. 2 vols. 8vo. Illustrated. 36s.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF STAFFORDSHIRE, comprising its Geology, Zoology, Botany, and Meteorology; also its Antiquities, Topography, Manufactures, &c. By Robert Garner, F.L.S. Illustrated, 8vo. 1l. 1s.
AN ARCTIC VOYAGE TO BAFFIN’S BAY AND LANCASTER SOUND, in search of Friends with Sir John Franklin. By Robert A. Goodsir, late President of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh. Post 8vo., with a Frontispiece and Map, price 5s. 6d.
THE BIRDS OF JAMAICA. By P. H. Gosse. Post 8vo., price 10s. Also by Mr. Gosse,
THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. With 44 Illustrations of the most remarkable Animal and Vegetable productions. Post 8vo. 12s.
UNIVERSAL STENOGRAPHY; or, A New and Practical System of Short-hand Writing, on the basis of Taylor. By William Harding. 12mo. 3s. sewed. 3s. 6d. bound.
THE SEA-SIDE BOOK: being an Introduction to the Natural History of the British Coasts. By Professor Harvey, M.D., M.R.I.A. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo., with 69 Illustrations, 5s. Also by Professor Harvey,
A MANUAL OF THE BRITISH MARINE ALGÆ: containing Generic and Specific Descriptions of all the known British Species of Sea-Weeds, with Plates to illustrate all the Genera. 8vo. 21s. coloured copies, 31s. 6d.
PERRAN-ZABULOE; with an Account of the Past and Present State of the Oratory of St. Piran-in-the-Sands, and Remarks on its Antiquity. By the Rev. Wm. Haslam, B.A., Resident Curate. Foolscap 8vo., with several Illustrations, 4s. 6d.
THE RUDIMENTS OF BOTANY. A familiar Introduction to the Study of Plants. By Arthur Henfrey, F.L.S., Lecturer on Botany at St. George’s Hospital. 16mo., with illustrative Woodcuts, 3s. 6d.
ANATOMICAL MANIPULATION; or, Methods of pursuing Practical Investigations in Comparative Anatomy and Physiology: also an Introduction to the Use of the Microscope, &c., and an Appendix. By Mr. Henfrey and Alfred Tulk, M.R.C.S., M.E.S. Foolscap 8vo., with Diagrams, 9s.
JOHN VAN VOORST, 1, PATERNOSTER ROW.
OUTLINES OF STRUCTURAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL BOTANY. By Arthur Henfrey, F.L.S., Lecturer on Botany at St. George’s Hospital. With 18 Plates, Foolscap 8vo. 10s. 6d.
GROTIUS’ INTRODUCTION TO DUTCH JURISPRUDENCE. Now first rendered into English, by Charles Herbert, of the Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law. Royal 8vo. 1l. 11s. 6d.
COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE EGGS OF BRITISH BIRDS: accompanied with Descriptions of the Eggs, Nests, &c. By William C. Hewitson, F.L.S. Two vols. 8vo., 4l. 10s. The arrangement adopted in this work is that employed by Mr. Yarrell in his “History of British Birds.”
OBSERVATIONS IN NATURAL HISTORY; with a Calendar of Periodic Phenomena. By the Rev. Leonard Jenyns, M.A., F.L.S. Post 8vo., 10s. 6d.
AN ANGLER’S RAMBLES. Contents: Thames Fishing, Trolling in Staffordshire, Perch Fishing-club, Two Days’ Fly-fishing on the Test, Luckford Fishing-club, Grayling Fishing, a visit to Oxford, the Country Clergyman. By Edward Jesse, F.L.S., Author of “Gleanings in Natural History.” Post 8vo., 10s. 6d.
AN INTRODUCTION TO CONCHOLOGY; or, Elements of the Natural History of Molluscous Animals. By George Johnston, M.D., LL.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh; Author of “A History of the British Zoophytes.” 8vo., 102 Illustrations, 21s. Also by Dr. Johnston,
A HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ZOOPHYTES. Second Edition in 2 vols. 8vo., with an Illustration of every Species. 2l. 2s.; or on large paper (royal 8vo.) 4l. 4s.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ANIMALS. By Professor T. Rymer Jones, F.R.S., F.Z.S. Vol. I., with 105 Illustrations, post 8vo. 12s. Also by Professor T. Rymer Jones,
A GENERAL OUTLINE OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM AND MANUAL OF COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. In one thick vol. 8vo., containing nearly 350 Illustrations, 38s. Or Royal 8vo., 3l. 16s. Imperial 8vo., 5l. 14s.
FLORA CALPENSIS: Contributions to the Botany and Topography of Gibraltar and its neighbourhood, with Plan and Views of the Rock. To which is added a Translation of Ed. Boissier’s Account of the Vegetation of Gibraltar, with Description of New Species. By E. F. Kelaart, M.D., F.L.S., Army Medical Staff. 8vo. cloth, 10s. 6d.
ORNITHOLOGICAL RAMBLES IN SUSSEX; with a Systematic Catalogue of the Birds of that County, and Remarks on their Local Distribution. By A. E. Knox, M.A., F.L.S. Post 8vo., with 4 Lithographic Views, 7s. 6d. Second Edition. Also by Mr. Knox,
GAME BIRDS AND WILD FOWL: their Friends and their Foes. With Illustrations by Wolf. Post 8vo., price 9s.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE VARIETIES OF MAN. By Robert Gordon Latham, M.D., F.R.S., Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge; Vice-President of the Ethnological Society of London; Corresponding Member of the Ethnological Society of New York. 8vo., illustrated, 21s.
JOHN VAN VOORST, 1, PATERNOSTER ROW.
HERALDRY OF FISH. By Thomas Moule. The Engravings, 205 in number, are from Stained Glass, Tombs, Sculpture and Carving, Medals and Coins, Rolls of Arms, and Pedigrees. 8vo., 21s. A few on large paper (royal 8vo.) for colouring, price 2l. 2s.
A FAMILIAR INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF INSECTS. With numerous Illustrations. By Edward Newman, F.L.S. One vol. 8vo., 12s.
A HISTORY OF BRITISH FOSSIL MAMMALS AND BIRDS. By Professor Owen, F.R.S., &c. In 8vo., with 237 Illustrations, price 1l. 11s. 6d.; on large paper (royal 8vo.), 3l. 3s.
ON PARTHENOGENESIS; or, The Successive Production of Procreating Individuals from a single Ovum. By Professor Owen, F.R.S. 8vo. 5s.
A MANUAL OF GOTHIC MOLDINGS. A Practical Treatise on their Formation, Gradual Development, Combinations, and Varieties; with full Directions for copying them, and for determining their Dates. By F. A. Paley, M.A. Second Edition, Illustrated by nearly 600 Examples. 8vo., 7s. 6d.
A HISTORY OF BRITISH FOREST-TREES, Indigenous and Introduced. By Prideaux John Selby, F.L.S., M.W.S., &c. Nearly 200 Engravings. 8vo. 28s., royal 8vo., 2l. 16s.
A HISTORY OF BRITISH BIRDS. By William Yarrell, F.L.S., V.P.Z.S., &c. This work contains a history and a portrait of each species of the Birds found in Britain. The three volumes contain 535 Illustrations. Second Edition. 3 vols. demy 8vo., 4l. 14s. 6d.; royal 8vo., 9l.; or imperial 8vo., 13l. 10s. A Supplement to the first edition, demy 8vo., 2s. 6d.; royal 8vo., 5s.; imperial 8vo., 7s. 6d. Also by Mr. Yarrell,
A HISTORY OF BRITISH FISHES. Second Edition, in two vols. demy 8vo. Illustrated by nearly 500 Engravings, 3l. A Supplement to the First Edition, demy 8vo., 7s. 6d.; royal 8vo., 15s.; imperial 8vo., 1l. 2s. 6d.
BAPTISMAL FONTS. A Series of 125 Engravings, Examples of the different Periods, accompanied with Descriptions; and with an Introductory Essay by Mr. Paley. 8vo., 1l. 1s.
DOMESTIC SCENES IN GREENLAND AND ICELAND. 16mo., Illustrated, 2s. 6d. Second Edition.
ELEMENTS OF PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE; Explaining, in Question and Answer, and in familiar language, what most things daily used, seen, or talked of, are; what they are made of, where found, and to what uses applied. Second Edition, 16mo., with Illustrations, 3s.
THE POOR ARTIST; or, Seven Eye-Sights and One Object. Fcap. 8vo. 5s.
GOLDSMITH’S VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. With 32 Illustrations, by William Mulready, R.A.; engraved by John Thompson. Square 8vo., 1l. 1s., or 36s. in morocco.
WATTS’S DIVINE AND MORAL SONGS. With 30 Illustrations, by C. W. Cope, R.A.; engraved by John Thompson. Square 8vo., 7s. 6d., or 21s. in morocco.
London, December 1860.
Catalogue of Books
PUBLISHED BY MR. VAN VOORST.
INDEX.
Accentuated List, p. 7
Adams & Baikie’s Manual Nat. Hist., 12
Adams’s Genera of Mollusca, 5
Aikin’s Arts and Manufactures, 14
Anatomical Manipulation, 12
Ansted’s Ancient World, 9
—— Elementary Course of Geology, 9
—— Geologist’s Text-Book, 9
—— Gold-Seeker’s Manual, 9
—— Scenery, Science, and Art, 14
Babington’s Flora of Cambridgeshire, 7
—— Manual of British Botany, 7
Baptismal Fonts, 15
Bate and Westwood’s British Crustacea, 5
Beale on Sperm Whale, 3
Bell’s British Quadrupeds, 3
—— British Reptiles, 4
—— British Stalk-eyed Crustacea, 5
Bennett’s Naturalist in Australasia, 11
Bloomfield’s Farmer’s Boy, 16
Boccius on Production of Fish, 4
Bonaparte’s List of Birds, 3
Brightwell’s Life of Linnæus, 14
Burton’s Falconry on the Indus, 3
Church and Northcote’s Chem. Analysis, 9
Clark’s Testaceous Mollusca, 5
Cocks’s Sea-Weed Collector’s Guide, 8
Couch’s Illustrations of Instinct, 11
Cumming’s Isle of Man, 13
Currency, 16
Dallas’s Elements of Entomology, 5
Dalyell’s Powers of the Creator, 12
—— Rare Animals of Scotland, 12
Dawson’s Geodephaga Britannica, 7
Domestic Scenes in Greenland & Iceland, 14
Douglas’s World of Insects, 6
Dowden’s Walks after Wild Flowers, 8
Drew’s Practical Meteorology, 11
Drummond’s First Steps to Anatomy, 11
Economy of Human Life, 16
Elements of Practical Knowledge, 14
England before the Norman Conquest, 14
Entomologist’s Annual, 5
—— Companion, 6
Evening Thoughts, 14
Fly Fishing in Salt and Fresh Water, 4
Forbes’s British Star-fishes, 5
—— Malacologia Monensis, 5
—— and Hanley’s British Mollusca, 5
—— and Spratt’s Travels in Lycia, 13
Garner’s Nat. Hist. of Staffordshire, 13
—— Figures of Invertebrate Animals, 14
Gosse’s Aquarium, 13
—— Birds of Jamaica, 3
Gosse’s British Sea-Anemones, &c., 13
—— Canadian Naturalist, 13
—— Handbook to Marine Aquarium, 13
—— Manual of Marine Zoology, 13
—— Naturalist’s Rambles on Dev. Coast, 13
—— Omphalos, 10
—— Tenby, 13
Gray’s Bard and Elegy, 15
Greg and Lettsom’s British Mineralogy, 10
Griffith & Henfrey’s Micrographic Dict., 11
Harvey’s British Marine Algæ, 8
—— Thesaurus Capensis, 8
—— Flora Capensis, 8
—— Index Generum Algarum , 8
—— Nereis Boreali-Americana, 8
—— Sea-side Book, 13
Henfrey’s Botanical Diagrams, 7
—— Elementary Course of Botany, 7
—— Rudiments of Botany, 7
—— Translation of Mohl, 7
—— Vegetation of Europe, 7
—— & Griffith’s Micrographic Dict., 11
—— & Tulk’s Anatomical Manipulation, 12
Hewitson’s Birds’ Eggs, 3
—— Exotic Butterflies, 6
Instrumenta Ecclesiastica, 15
Jenyns’s Observations in Meteorology, 11
—— Observations in Natural History, 11
—— White’s Selborne, 13
Jesse’s Angler’s Rambles, 4
Johnston’s British Zoophytes, 6
—— Introduction to Conchology, 5
—— Terra Lindisfarnensis, 9
Jones’s Aquarian Naturalist, 11
—— Animal Kingdom, 11
—— Natural History of Animals, 11
Knox’s (A. E.) Rambles in Sussex, 3
Knox (Dr.), Great Artists & Great Anat., 11
Latham’s Descriptive Ethnology, 12
—— Ethnology of British Colonies, 12
—— Ethnology of British Islands, 12
—— Ethnology of Europe, 12
—— Man and his Migrations, 12
—— Varieties of Man, 12
Leach’s Synopsis of British Mollusca, 5
Letters of Rusticus, 12
Lettsom and Greg’s British Mineralogy, 10
Lowe’s Faunæ et Floræ Maderæ, 8
—— Manual Flora of Madeira, 8
Malan’s Catalogue of Eggs, 3
Martin’s Cat. of Privately Printed Books, 16
Melville and Strickland on the Dodo, 4
Micrographic Dictionary, 11
Mohl on the Vegetable Cell, 7
Moule’s Heraldry of Fish p. 4
Newman’s British Ferns 9
—— History of Insects 6
—— Letters of Rusticus 12
Northcote & Church’s Chem. Analysis 9
Owen’s British Fossil Mammals 10
—— on Skeleton of Extinct Sloth 10
Paley’s Gothic Moldings 16
—— Manual of Gothic Architecture 16
Poor Artist 14
Prescott on Tobacco 14
Prestwich’s Geological Inquiry 10
—— Ground beneath us 10
Samuelson’s Honey-Bee 10
—— Earthworm and Housefly 10
Sclater’s Tanagers 3
Seemann’s British Ferns at One View 7
Selby’s British Forest Trees 8
Shakspeare’s Seven Ages of Man 15
Sharpe’s Decorated Windows 15
Shield’s Hints on Moths and Butterflies 6
Siebold on True Parthenogenesis 6
Smith’s British Diatomaceæ 9
Spratt and Forbes’s Travels in Lycia 13
Stainton’s Butterflies and Moths 6
—— History of the Tineina 6
Strickland’s Ornithological Synonyms 4
—— Memoirs 10
—— and Melville on the Dodo 4
Sunday-Book for the Young 14
Tugwell’s Sea-Anemones 6
Tulk and Henfrey’s Anat. Manipulation 12
Vicar of Wakefield, Illustr. by Mulready 15
Watts’s Songs, Illustrated by Cope 16
Ward (Dr.) on Healthy Respiration 14
Ward (N. B.) on the Growth of Plants 8
Westwood and Bate’s British Crustacea 5
White’s Selborne 13
Wilkinson’s Weeds and Wild Flowers 7
Williams’s Chemical Manipulation 9
Wollaston’s Insecta Maderensia 7
—— on Variation of Species 12
Yarrell’s British Birds 3
—— British Fishes 4
—— on the Salmon 4
NATURAL HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ISLES.
This Series of Works is Illustrated by many Hundred Engravings; every Species has been Drawn and Engraved under the immediate inspection of the Authors; the best Artists have been employed, and no care or expense has been spared.
A few Copies have been printed on Larger Paper.
SESSILE-EYED CRUSTACEA, by Mr. Spence Bate and Mr. Westwood. Part 1, price 2s. 6d., on January 1st, 1861.
QUADRUPEDS, by Professor Bell. A New Edition preparing.
BIRDS, by Mr. Yarrell. Third Edition, 3 vols. £4 14s. 6d.
COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE EGGS OF BIRDS, by Mr. Hewitson. Third Edition, 2 vols., £4 14s. 6d.
REPTILES, by Professor Bell. Second Edition, 12s.
FISHES, by Mr. Yarrell. Third Edition, edited by Sir John Richardson, 2 vols., £3 3s.
STALK-EYED CRUSTACEA, by Prof. Bell. 8vo, £1 5s.
STAR-FISHES, by Professor Edward Forbes. 15s.
ZOOPHYTES, by Dr. Johnston. Second Edition, 2 vols., £2 2s.
MOLLUSCOUS ANIMALS AND THEIR SHELLS, by Professor Edward Forbes and Mr. Hanley. 4 vols. 8vo, £6 10s. Royal 8vo, Coloured, £13.
FOREST TREES, by Mr. Selby. £1 8s.
FERNS, by Mr. Newman. Third Edition, 18s.
FOSSIL MAMMALS AND BIRDS, by Prof. Owen. £1 11s. 6d.
JOHN VAN VOORST, 1 PATERNOSTER ROW.
ZOOLOGY.
MAMMALIA.
History of British Quadrupeds, including the Cetacea. By THOMAS BELL, F.R.S., P.L.S., Professor of Zoology in King’s College, London. Illustrated by nearly 200 Engravings, comprising portraits of the animals, and vignette tail-pieces. 8vo. New Edition in preparation.
Natural History of the Sperm Whale, and a Sketch of a South Sea Whaling Voyage. By THOMAS BEALE. Post 8vo, 12s. cloth.
BIRDS.
History of British Birds. By WILLIAM YARRELL, V.P.L.S., F.Z.S., &c. This work contains a history and a picture portrait, engraved expressly for the work, of each species of the Birds found in Britain. Three volumes, containing 550 Illustrations. Third Edition, demy 8vo, £4 14s. 6d.
Coloured Illustrations of the Eggs of British Birds, with Descriptions of their Nests and Nidification. By WILLIAM C. HEWITSON. Third Edition, 2 vols. 8vo, £4 14s. 6d. The figures and descriptions of the Eggs in this edition are from different specimens to those figured in the previous editions.
Systematic Catalogue of the Eggs of British Birds, arranged with a View to supersede the use of Labels for Eggs. By the Rev. S. C. MALAN, M.A., M.A.S. On writing-paper. 8vo, 8s. 6d.
Ornithological Rambles in Sussex. By A. E. KNOX, M.A., F.L.S. Third Edition. Post 8vo, with Four Illustrations by Wolf, 7s. 6d.
Falconry in the Valley of the Indus. By R. F. BURTON, Author of ‘Goa and the Blue Mountains,’ &c. Post 8vo, with Four Illustrations, 6s.
Monograph of the Birds forming the Tanagrine Genus CALLISTE; illustrated by Coloured Plates of all the known species. By P. L. SCLATER, M.A., Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, F.Z.S., &c. 8vo, £2 2s.
Birds of Jamaica. By P. H. GOSSE, F.R.S., Author of the ‘Canadian Naturalist,’ &c. Post 8vo, 10s.
Geographical and Comparative List of the Birds of Europe and North America. By CHARLES LUCIEN BONAPARTE, Prince of Musignano. 8vo, 5s.
The Dodo and its Kindred; or, The History, Affinities and Osteology of the Dodo, Solitaire, and other Extinct Birds of the Islands Mauritius, Rodriguez, and Bourbon. By H. E. STRICKLAND, M.A., F.G.S., F.R.G.S., and R. G. MELVILLE, M.D. Edin., M.R.C.S. Royal 4to, with 18 Plates and other Illustrations, £1 1s.
Ornithological Synonyms. By the late HUGH EDWIN STRICKLAND, M.A., F.R.S., &c. Edited by Mrs. HUGH EDWIN STRICKLAND and SIR WILLIAM JARDINE, Bart., F.R.S.E., &c. 8vo, Vol. I. containing the Order Accipitres, 12s. 6d. Vol. II. in the press.
REPTILES.
History of British Reptiles. By THOMAS BELL, F.R.S., President of the Linnean Society, V.P.Z.S., &c., Professor of Zoology in King’s College, London. Second Edition, with 50 Illustrations, 12s.
FISHES.
Production and Management of Fish in Fresh Waters, by Artificial Spawning, Breeding, and Rearing. By GOTTLIEB BOCCIUS. 8vo, 5s.
History of British Fishes. By WILLIAM YARRELL, V.P.L.S., F.Z.S., &c. Third Edition. Edited by SIR JOHN RICHARDSON, M.D. Two vols. demy 8vo, illustrated by more than 500 Engravings, £3 3s.
Yarrell.—Growth of the Salmon in Fresh Water. With Six Coloured Illustrations of the Fish of the natural size, exhibiting its structure and exact appearance at various stages during the first two years. 12s. sewed.
Heraldry of Fish. By THOMAS MOULE. Nearly six hundred families are noticed in this work, and besides the several descriptions of fish, fishing-nets, and boats, are included also mermaids, tritons, and shell-fish. Nearly seventy ancient seals are described, and upwards of twenty subjects in stained glass. The engravings, two hundred and five in number, are from stained glass, tombs, sculpture and carving, medals and coins, rolls of arms, and pedigrees. 8vo, 21s.; a few on large paper (royal 8vo) for colouring, £2 2s.
Fly-Fishing in Salt and Fresh Water. With Six Coloured Plates, representing Artificial Flies, &c. 8vo, 7s. 6d.
An Angler’s Rambles. By EDWARD JESSE, F.L.S., Author of ‘Gleanings in Natural History.’ Contents:—Thames Fishing—Trolling in Staffordshire—Perch Fishing Club—Two Days’ Fly-fishing on the Test—Luckford Fishing Club—Grayling Fishing—A Visit to Oxford—The Country Clergyman. Post 8vo, 10s. 6d.
INVERTEBRATA.
History of British Sessile-eyed Crustacea (Sand-hoppers, &c.). By C. SPENCE BATE, F.L.S., and J. O. WESTWOOD, F.L.S., &c. With figures of all the species, and tail-pieces. Uniform with the Stalk-eyed Crustacea by Professor Bell. Part I on January 1st.
History of British Stalk-eyed Crustacea (Lobsters, Crabs, Prawns, Shrimps, &c.). By THOMAS BELL, President of the Linnean Society, F.G.S., F.Z.S., Professor of Zoology in King’s College, London. The volume is illustrated by 174 Engravings of Species and tail-pieces. 8vo, £1 5s.; royal 8vo, £2 10s.
Introduction to Conchology; or, Elements of the Natural History of Molluscous Animals. By GEORGE JOHNSTON, M.D., LL.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, author of ‘A History of the British Zoophytes.’ 8vo, 102 Illustrations, 21s.
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] The great incorrectness, and occasional inconvenience of this name will be seen in the sequel.
[2] See the chapter on the ethnology of Greece.
[3] In these notices of the characteristics of the different Spanish districts, provinces, or kingdoms, I follow the “Handbook for Spain,”—a work well known to be, for its kind, of more than ordinary value.
[4] I prefer this word to Roman, because it by no means follows that because a settlement was made by a Legion or a part of one, it was therefore Roman.
[5] It would be more accurate to say that Llocgyr was the Welsh name of the supposed maritime parts of England.
[6] “Taciti Germania, with Ethnological Notes,” §. on the Quasi-Germanic Gauls.
[7] “Lectures on the History of France,” i. 233, 234.
[8] Observe that the oldest name of the island is Greek.
[9] Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, clvi.
[10] Gulielmus Appulus, lib. i., from Gibbon, lvi.
[11] By Semitic is meant Jewish and Phœnician collectively.
[12] Lib. ii.
[13] This series of facts was recognized by Gibbon; is well illustrated by Zeuss (see Greek Slavonians), and has been carried to an extreme length by Fallermayer.
[14] Taciti Germania, xciv.
[16] Ermann—Prichard, vol. iv. p. 346.
[17] The details of this theory are given in the author’s “Germania of Tacitus, with Ethnological Notes,” § Goths.
[18] “The Ethnology of the British Islands.”
[19] Island undersögt fra en lægevidenskabeligt Synspunct, af P. A. Schleisner, M.D.
[20] Stockfleth—Bidrag til Kundskab om Finnerne i Norge.—1848.
[21] The “J” is pronounced “Y.”
[22] “The Germania of Tacitus, with Ethnological Notes,” Epilegomena cxxxi.
[23] I may reasonably be charged with finding the name Goth in everything, in Getæ, Gothi, Gothones, Gothini, Jutæ, Vitæ, and Jats. But as I care far more for processes than results a somewhat sharp self-examination acquits me. Starting with the doctrine that nothing is to be considered accidental which we can reasonably investigate, I only demur to those conclusions which are incompatible with undoubted facts. Is this the case with any of the deductions hitherto laid before the reader? First let us look to them in respect to the facts they assume. Of these the most startling is the presence of Lithuanians in the Vithesleth and in India. Yet, if the oldest occupants of the Danish Islands were not Germans, what were they likelier to have been than Lithuanians, considering that Prussia was Lithuanic? “Slavonians,” it may be answered. Granted; but the Slavonic character of the Vithesleth is as much opposed to current notions as the Lithuanic. Besides which, the difference is only one of detail. Then, as to the Lithuanian elements in India. If we hesitate to deduce these from Europe, we must deduce the Indian elements in Lithuania from Asia. There is a difficulty either way. Then, as to the changes in the form of the word. Take the two extremest forms, Goth-, and Vit-. Is this change legitimate? The answer to this lies in the fact of the Russian form for Master being Gosp-odar, whereas the Lithuanic is Visp-ati.
Since the chapter on the ethnology of Scandinavia was printed, Mr. Worsaae has made me acquainted with a remarkable fact connected with the Isle of Laaland, confirmatory of the belief of a Sarmatian population partially, at least, in the Vithesleth. In the southern part of the island some of the geographical terms are Slavonic, and in Saxo there is the statement, that when the other Danes prepared an invasion against their Wend, or Slavonic, enemies, of the continent, the Laalanders were neither allowed to take a part in them, nor yet informed of their being in contemplation; for fear lest they should communicate the news to the Wends (Slavonians).
[27] “This book ought to be largely circulated, not only on account of its scientific merits—though these, as we have in part shown, are great and signal—but because it is popularly written throughout, and therefore likely to excite general attention to a subject which ought to be held as one of primary importance. Every one is interested about fishes—the political economist, the epicure, the merchant, the man of science, the angler, the poor, the rich. We hail the appearance of this book as the dawn of a new era in the Natural History of England.”—Quarterly Review, No. 116.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: |
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all the popution=> all the population {pg 214} |
unquestionbly=> unquestionably {pg 216} |