Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/401

X.] with the more aboriginal races of Europe; but these are not the forces which enable the language of a small minority to stifle that of the masses of a people and to take its place; if it were so, southern Europe would now be talking Germanic instead of Romanic dialects. The rude beginnings of a higher civilization, as metals, instruments, seeds, domestic animals, arts, may possibly have been theirs; yet even these would merely engraft upon the languages of the peoples to whom they were made known certain words and phrases. Only the resources of an enlightened culture, supplemented by letters, literature, and instruction, could give to any tongue the expansive force demanded by the theory we are considering; and of these, it is needless to say, no traces are to be found in Indo-European antiquity. We have no good ground, then, for doubting that the great extension of the languages of our family was effected by the usual causes which act among uncultivated tongues: that is to say, mainly by the growth, spread, and emigration of a single race; by its occupancy of ever new territory, accompanied with the partial destruction and partial expulsion, sometimes also with the partial incorporation and absorption, of the former inhabitants; the element of population which inherited the speech and institutions of the original Indo-European tribe being ever the predominant one in each new community that was formed. How many fragments of other races may have been worked in during the course of the family's migrations—how far the purity of blood of one or another of its branches or sub-branches may have been thus affected by successive partial dilutions, so that some of their present peculiarities of type are attributable to the mixture—is, of course, a legitimate matter for inquiry, and one upon which we may even look for information from their languages, when these shall have been more narrowly examined. But upon the whole, in the light of our present knowledge, we are justified in regarding the boundaries of Indo-European speech as approximately coinciding with those of a race; the tie of language represents a tie of blood.

If the limitations and imperfections of the two kinds of evidence are thus in certain respects somewhat evenly