Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/282

258 in mind that the oldest names for the outstanding features of the country in Europe are of Celtic origin, and that the Celts are, both in point of locality and civil progress, an outlying, isolated, and diminishing stock, we may safely infer that they were the first to move westwards. All the traditions of the Græco-Latin stock point to an Eastern origin, and that a very remote one. On the other hand, not till the fourth century do the Teutons emerge from obscurity and take a place in literature. They are then on the lower Danube, but driven into the Empire by ruder barbarians on the North. The translation of the New Testament by the Bishop of the Goths, Wulfila (about 360 ), constitutes, philologically speaking, the Veda of the Teutons. The language of the Goths retains very many of the characteristics of the primitive Aryans, and throws besides invaluable light on the whole subsequent dialectic growth of the Teutonic tongues. The Slavs, having for centuries to maintain a hard contest between their Teutonic brethren on the west of the Sarmatian plain and the Mongol savages of the east, have arisen but slowly out of their primitive barbarism. Their language, however, preserves some singularly interesting archaisms.

As the great schism that has permanently separated the Asiatic from the European groups brings us nearest to the proto-Aryan period, whatever throws light upon the significance of that event serves still further to illustrate the stage of culture which the combined stock had reached. We have seen on what points of material, mental, and moral culture they all agree. It will be important to notice in what respects they differ. Roots will be found to divide in a mysterious way, so that the North-western group, for example, prefers to express the action of milking as stroking, softening (marg-), the South-eastern as drawing (duh-). Similarly the root ar- goes to Europe as ploughing, and remains in Asia as rowing, the Hindoos betaking themselves to another common radical (karsh—to draw) to express the former action; while the Sans. kshuma is supplanted in the West by linen, flax. Of more special growths we have the Vaidic soma as a sacred beverage remaining strictly in the East, while vinum spreads all over the West. It was probably due to climatic conditions that the Hindoos added to the primi-