Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/635

Rh and bankrupt people under the sun. Vogt and De Charency connected them directly with the American Indians, because of the similarity in the structure of their language. Then De Charency changed his mind and derived them from Asiatic sources. Sir William Betharn made them kin to the extinct Etruscans. Bory de Saint-Vincent proved that they were the sole survivors of the sunken continent of Atlantis; of the type of the now extinct Guanches of the Canary islands. Max Müller gives some evidence of similarity to the Lapps, the Finns, and the Bulgarians. Others said the ancient Egyptians were related to them. We have no space to mention more. Little by little opinion crystallized, especially among the historians, about the thesis upheld by Wilhelm von Humboldt, that the Basque was a survival of the ancient Celt-Iberian language of Spain; and that these people were the last remnants of the ancient inhabitants of that peninsula. Pictet was the only linguistic dissident from this view, holding that the Basques were of even greater antiquity; being in fact the prehistoric race type of Europe, antedating the Aryan influx altogether. So much, then, for the conclusions of the philologists. Not very satisfactory, to be sure!

It will be observed that all these theories rested upon the assumption that racial derivation could be traced by means of language. A prime difficulty soon presented itself. Some thirty years ago the Basque language was found to be drifting toward the north, despite the apparent immobility of the people themselves. It seemed to be losing ground rapidly in Spain, with no indication of doing so, rather the reverse, in France. Nor was this apparently a new development. Everything denoted that it had been going on for many years. The mode of proof is interesting as Broca used it. There are two independent sources of evidence. In the first instance the place names all over Navarra as far south as the Ebro River are of Basque origin; although the language, as our map shows, does not to-day extend nearly as far. This indicates that the Basque speech prevailed when the villages, the mountains, and the rivers were named. No such zone of place names lies outside the speech line in France, save in one canton, just over the Pyrenees. There the Basque place names extend out as far as the broad white line upon our sketch, shown more clearly perhaps upon our other maps. The inward bend of the curve of present speech at this place points to a retrogression of language. Everywhere else in France the division line of place names coincides very closely with that of speech.

No less important proof that Basque is losing ground in Spain but holding its own in France is at hand. Notice on the map that the Spanish language is to-day in use considerably within the Basque limit. In other words, there is an intermediate zone in