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VI.] century, since, down to that time, the cultivated of the nation had written wholly in Latin. The others can show nothing older than the sixteenth century, and are of little consequence in any aspect.

The Lithuanic or Lettic group of dialects is sometimes treated as a subdivision of the Slavonic, and sometimes—perhaps with better reason—as a separate branch, coördinate with the other, although very closely related to it. It is of very slight historical or literary importance: its interest lies chiefly in the fact that, under the operation of causes in its history which are yet unexplained and probably unexplainable, it has preserved many of the original forms of Indo-European speech in a more uncorrupted condition than any other known dialect of the whole family which is not as much as two thousand years older. It is composed of only three dialects, one of which, the Old Prussian, the original language of the inhabitants of north-eastern Prussia, has been extinct for two hundred years, crowded out of existence by the Low-German, and leaving behind, as its only monument, a brief catechism. The other two, the Lithuanian and the Lettish, or Livonian, are still spoken by a million or two of people in the Russian and Prussian provinces bordering on the Baltic, but seem destined to give way helplessly before the encroachments of the German and Russian, and to share one day the fate of their sister-dialect. The oldest Lithuanian document dates from the middle of the sixteenth century. The southern or High Lithuanian is of most antique form; the Low Lithuanian, and yet more notably the Lettish to the north, show a less remarkable conservation of ancient material.

The Celtic languages, as was pointed out in the last lecture, have been well-nigh extinguished by the Romanic and Germanic tongues, and now only lurk in the remotest and most inaccessible corners of the wide territory which they once occupied in Europe. The Scotch Highlands, the wildest parts of Ireland, the Isle of Man, the mountains of Wales, the rough glens of Cornwall, and the land lying nearest to Cornwall across the British Channel, the promontory of Brittany, are the only regions where, for many centuries