Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/39

Rh nascent civilization, which though distinct from that of Rome might of itself have attained a no less remarkable development under happier circumstances.

Such are the questions I now propose for your consideration. But before entering on them it seems to me advisable to enquire who were the people inhabiting the island when it first became known to the Romans, and what were their respectively different nationalities.

The early history of man is little more than a history of his migrations, and all tradition and observation show that those migrations have been proceeding in the same course from the first periods. Whatever might have been the impelling motive, whether from the natural restlessness characteristic of uncultivated tribes, or from internal dissensions in a state, or on account of the inroads of foreign invaders, we find wave after wave, if we may use the expression, of the several tides of population flowing on in a continued stream. Thus we find the people inhabiting any particular country at a stated period often very different from those who inhabited it at a preceding or a subsequent period, and hence with reference to such people the Ethnologist and scholar must enquire primarily who they were and whence they came.

These observations however apply principally to the first periods of population. When mankind only numbered a few families or tribes and the world was all before them where to choose their habitations, it was a matter of little moment where they determined to abide. But when their numbers increased so much that not only were the best localities crowded, but also the less eligible were densely occupied, then came the struggle for the more favourable settlements, and contests and conquests arose to arrest the attention of the historian, and excite the curiosity of the enquirer in after ages. For then came the amalgamation of different nations, and the formation of different languages, the elucidation of which forms one of the chief and most interesting duties of the Ethnologist.

In this manner various different nationalities have swept across the whole extent of the globe, and especially over Europe, as we know it, have left traces more or less distinct of their progress. Where the countries were thinly populated, the conquered or expelled first possessors would naturally leave few or no perceptible traces; but where they had been more densely peopled, it would be almost out of the power of any conqueror to efface all traces of the former inhabitants.