Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/16

4 a part of the continent or of the sea (Hist. Nat. lib. xvi.) The whole passage is so graphic as to deserve a full citation:—"Sunt vero in Septemtrione visæ nobis Chaucorum qui majores minoresque appellantur. Vasto ibi ineatu bis dierum noctiumque singularum intervallis, effusus in immensum agitur oceanus, æternam operiens rerum naturæ controversiam, dubiumque terræ sit an parte in maris. Illic misera gens tumulos obtinet altos, aut tribunalia structa manibus ad experimenta altissimi æstus, casis ita impositis navigantibus similes cum integant aquæ circumdata, naufragis vero cum recesserint: fugientesque cum mari pisces circa tuguria venantur. Non pecudem his habere, non lacte ali ut finitimis, ne cum feris quidem dimicare contigit, omni procul abacto frutice."

Such were the people in that age who, already pushed forward undoubtedly by others, whether to be called Teutonic or Germans, had entrenched themselves in the alluvial shores at the mouth of the Rhine, while others had been driven away to Britain or elsewhere. Some of the frontier tribes had perhaps amalgamated with, or settled down amicably among the neighbouring Gauls, keeping up however their national characteristics, as we find now for instance in the same country, at Brussels, people of different origin and speaking different languages living together. But already the inhabitants of that region seem to have belonged to the first tide of German population, pushed on by others of the same family, who had dispossessed the Gauls, the primitive inhabitants, and seized first the more eligible situations, and afterwards having sections occupying situations less desirable.

Among all nations we may observe that in the bordering districts of their respective countries there is an approximation of dialects, which some writers have imagined to be connecting links in the great social circle of the human race; but which, if they are so in reality, probably only originated from the meeting of different families after long separations, with the increase of population. The word 'races', as applied to the different families of mankind, has been so misused by some writers, that it seems to me preferable to adopt the latter term only in advocating the theory that different families, as the Celtic, the Teutonic, the Scandinavian, and the Slavonic, having originally grown up into different nations in distant lands with different languages, afterwards approached each other so intimately as to imbibe many of their respective peculiarities, sometimes mingling together in a friendly manner, and sometimes hostilely as conquerors and conquered. The main bodies of the several