Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/361

] French Basque dialects are not descended from any of those of Aquitania, since their speakers first entered France after the fall of the Roman Empire, but they would be later descendants of some cognate dialect or dialects. Basque is the sole survivor of what may be called the Iberian family of speech, which was displaced by the Keltic invaders. It is useless to seek for traces of Basque words in local names, whether in France or elsewhere. Basque is too modern to allow us to know the forms of its words even a thousand years ago, while nothing is so soon corrupted as a proper name. Humboldt's attempt to explain local names in Western Europe by means of modern Basque is necessarily a failure. Until the Keltic vocabulary has been thoroughly examined, and its non-Aryan residuum made out, it is impossible to compare it with those Basque roots which have been extracted from a comparison of the Basque dialects."

I have every reason to believe that "the dissolving action of time," as Dr. Broca happily calls it, has obliterated the non-Aryan tongue, which may reasonably be believed to have been formerly spoken by the Neolithic aborigines of Britain. We have too many instances, writes Mr. Freeman, in "recorded history of nations laying aside the use of one language and taking to the use of another, for any one who cares for accuracy to set down language as any sure test of race. In fact the studies of the philologer, and those of the ethnologist strictly so called, are quite distinct, and deal with two different sets of phenomena." Even if then we assume