Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography Volume I Part 2.djvu/141

 ^82 EUBOPA of the British Celbi. In Europe, abo, it was easy to acclimatise the frnits and animals of other regions. The almond, oleander, the cheny, the acacia, and syringa were imported from Asia Minor; the vine and apricot, from Armenia; from Persia, many species of the nnmerons genns Pomnm, — the orange, peach, citxtn, &c; while the fig, olive, and date-palm, the damask rose and the mulherry, had heen transplanted from Libya and Syria. The European shores of the Mediterranean exhibit also many iamilies of African plants, and the £ora of Sicily and Baetica combine the prodactions of the temperate and tropical xones. Of these ad- ditions to the food or luxuxy of man, not a few were imported into Europe by ^e Greek or Soman con- querors of the East Nor were these accessions con- fined to the districts which at first received tlieoL To its Roman masters Gaul and the Rhenish pro- Tinces owed the vine, a finer breed of sheep, and several kinds of domestic poultry. The olive was carried from Greece to Spain, and the race of Gaulish horses improved by intermixture with the swifter and more delicately limbed varieties of Numidia and Arabia. Finally, the silkworm, whose productions scandalised the economists and philosophers of Rome by draining Italy of its gold and by adding new incentives to extravagance, was naturalised in Greece and Italy in the 6th centuiy of our era, and by its introducti(m gave a new im- pulse to European manufactures. IV. Population of Europe, — The history of the population of Europe belongs in part to the description of the several portions of it ; and, as a whole, is both too speculative and too extensive an inquiry for a sketch like the present. Neither are our materials for such an investigation either abundant or satis- factory. Our only guides on this point, beyond some doubtful resemblances of manners and customs, and some data founded upon the structure of language, are Greek and Roman writers. But the prejudice which led the Greeks to regard all unhellenic races as barbarous was very unfavourable to ethnological science; and even when they treat of pre-historic races, they throw a mythological veil over the records of early colonisation. The movements of mankind from the cast were, in tlieir conceptions, either regu- lated by a god, like Dionysus, or by the son of a god, like Heracles. The Romans, again, were satisfied with incorporating races among their provincials, and incurious about their origin or physical character- istics. The Greeks also, inhabiting the SE. comer of Europe, and watching the movements of their own colonies alone, or at most gleaning the re- ports of Phoenician and Etruscan mariners, often purposely involved in fable, always, it is probable, exaggerated, imagined that the main stream of European population had flowed generally across the Aegean sea from the coasts of Asia Minor, with oc- casional interruptions or admixtures from Phoenicia and Aegypt. They were unaware of the fact which modem ethnology has brought to light, that the course of immigration was rather from central Asia to central Europe, by a route lying north of the Euxine sea and intersecting the great rivers which flow east- ward and soutliward from the Alps and Russia. They traced the origin of music and song to Thrace, but they did not know, or would not admit, that the population of Hellas itself was derived quite as much from Thrace as from the Lesser Asia. Three main streams of population intermingling with each other in certain loodities, yet sufi^ently distmct for defi- EUROPA. nltion, maybe discerned: (I). The Celta ud Cim- merians, who entered our continent frtim the otcppea of the Caucasus, and, passing round the head of the Black sea, spread themselves over the whole of Eu- rope, and permanently settled in the wesL (2>. The Selavonians, or, as the andents denominatBd them, Scythians and Sarmatians, who occa|iied the east of Europe, where they an found beside the earliest Celtic odonies. The river Odtr, however. seems to have been the western limit of the Selavo- nians. Thence, without establishii^ themselves io the Alps, they turned in a southerly diiectioii, since they CGOtribttted largely to the population of both Greece and Italy. (3). The Teutons — who airived at different epochs : (1). as Low Germans, frtmi the regions between the Oxos and Jaxartes, a&d esta- blished themselves in the NW. of EurK^)e, and (3) as High Germans, who, displacing the Celts and Sclav<Hiians, occupied the middle-highlands of Ger- many, and in the historic period are fbnnd ^^ of the Rhine and north of the Danube. The whole plateau of central Europe, however, was perpetually undergoing a change in its population ftxm the flax and reflux of these principal elements ; and vrhen towards the close of the 1st century b.c. the Bomao legions passed the Rhine and entered the Herrynian forest, they found both Celts and High and Low Germans arrayed against them from the Helvetian pagi to the frontiers of Bohemia. The Iberian pemn- sula alone may serve for an example of the admixture of races in the European continent. In it we can trace no less than six waves of immigration. (1). The Celtic, pushed to its western barrier by the encroach ments of the ScUvonians and Teutons; (2). the Iberian, whose language, as it appears in ^e modem Basque dialect, indicates a Celto-Finnish origin, and consequently a derivation of the Iberian people itself from the remote eastern steppes of Asia: the Celtiberi, as their name imports, were a hybrid race formed by the fusion of the two; (3). the Liby- Phoenicians of the south, who were introduced by the Carthaginians ; and (4) an Italian element broiig:ht in by the Romans. A fifth variety was occasiooed by the irraption of the northern tribes — Vandals, Visa- goths, and Snevi — ^in the 5th century A.D., by which movement a High and Low German elemoit was added to the original population. Lastly, in tJw 8th century a.d., with the Arabian ccHiquest came an infusion of Semitic blood. The Gnek colonies — Saguntnm and Emporium, — founded by Zacynthiais and Massilians respectively, were scarcely so perma- nent or so important as to affect materially the popu- lation of Spain. V. Lanffuoffu of Europe. — Of the dialects spoken in ancient Europe we know even less than of its ethnography. The educated Romans used two languages fimiliarly, their own and the Greek ; the Greeks, one only: and both alike, in general, contemned all other idioms as unworthy the attention of civilised men. Their communication with foreign- ers was carried on through the medium of interpret- ers, and a few instances only are recorded of a Greek (Com. Nep. Tkemist. c. 10) or a Roman (O^, Ep. ex Pont iv., Ep. 13) undergmng the drudgery of learning a foreign tongue. On the other hand, the dialects of the other races of Europe, being neither refined nor preserved by a native literature, gradually vanished. The Celtic gave place in the Gauli^ and Spanish provinces of Rome to the general em- I^oyment of Latin : and even the Germans beyond the Rhine acquired the speech of their enemies