goes of the -^gean, throughout Qreece, and in southern
Italy ; then came the successive arrivals of the Lign-
rians and the Siculi, of the Illyrians, Thracians, and
'Bithynians, closely followed by the little group of
the Hellenic tribes. These vague traditions were all
suflScient for the most enlightened Greeks. As for
the different languages, which they certainly knew,
and which were not extinct in the sixth century before
our era, in the time of Peisistratus and Solon, it does
not appear that they ever thought of collecting them.
Their own idiom was enough for them ; all others were
barbarous jargons, useless and negligible. Plato
having remarked the resemblance of the names for
fire and dog in Greek and Phrygian, contents himself
with supposing that the Hellenes had perhaps received
certain words from the autochthonous races. Even
the prolonged contact with the Persians, whose lan-
guage was learned by a few Greeks, notably by
Alcibiades, did not win them from their indifference.



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228 Distributi on of Languages and Races.

The expedition of Alexander taught the invaders
nothing; the Sanscrit dialect spoken by Porus re-
maited a closed book to the learned men who sur-
rounded the king of Macedonia ; and if we did not
know that the Emperor Claudian had written sixteen
books on the history and the language of the Etruscans,
we might affirm that the sense of language was as
absolutely unknown to the Latins as to the Greeks.

We shall not expect to find the Middle Ages more
enlightened than antiquity. It took the ancestors of
modem peoples centuries to learn that which intelli-
gent humanity had already acquired before them.
Christianity, retaining a few scraps of Latin, the
science of the day, preached, to the new populations
resignation, humility, obedience, and ignorance. Tlie
fall of Constantinople, the exile from thence of the
scholars, and the dispersal of the Byzantine manu-
scripts, the. discovery of printing, were necessary to
rouse Europe from its torpor. This was the Renais-
sance ; the veil was lifted, at least for a few, and day
began to dawn - on Europe. Man turned again to
things of earth, and regaining an interest in all the
manifestations of human activity, leaving faith for
reason, recognised in speech the necessary instrument
of thought and analysed its organism. Nevertheless,
Respite the efforts of Bibliander, Henri Estienne,
Roccha, and Scaliger, who attempted some comparisons
between Greek, Latin, and French, and of Guichard,
who in his Earmonie Etymologique (1606) distin-
guished the Teutonic and the Romance dialects,
and constituted a separate family, including Hebrew,
Chaldean, and Syriac, a capital error long turned
philology from the right path. Orthodox logic could
not seek elsewhere than in Hebrew the origin of all



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Tfie IndO' Europeans. 229

languages. Was it not in Hebrew that God spoke
to Adam, and that the serpent tempted Eve ? More-
over, God had dictated the Decalogue in Hebrew, and
the creature made in his image could only speak in
Hebrew. Even the boldest dared not doubt it. It is
true that the adventure of Babel had happened since,
but should there not exist, in the dispersed and con-
fused languages, at least the traces of the primitive
tongue ? One can but admire the ingenuity displayed
by commentators and etymologists in the endeavour
to extract from the Bible the names of the gods of
the heathen, and even Latin and French words. In
order to bring Greek nearer to Hebrew, G uichard read
it backwards, from right to left.

Leibnitz was the first to oppose this inveterate
prejudice. " There is," he says, " as much reason to
consider Hebrew the primitive language as to adopt
the opinion of Goropius, who in 1580 published a
work at Antwerp to prove that Dutch was the language
spoken in the Garden of Eden." He was the first to
propose, in his " Dissertation on the Origin of Nations,"
the application of scientific methods to the science of
language. Surmising that, in the absence of written
history, the analysis of words might yield authentic
information on the ideas and manners of primitive
peoples, he proposed to Peter the Great, in 1 7 1 3, the
plan of a collection of vocabularies. He drew up
himself a list of common terms and encouraged the
work of the German Eckhardt. His hypotheses, as
we know, were too tentative, too little methodical to
succeed ; but by their very failure they pointed out
the way ; they showed that the first essential of fruit-
ful comparison is the collection and classification of a
sufficient number of facts.
16



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230 Distribution of Languages and Races.

The example of Leibnitz was followed by others.
And if guess-work played the principal part in the
clever study of Fr^ret on the " Origin and Mixture of
Ancient Nations," if the premature philosophy of lan-
guage, as displayed in the " Primitive World " of Court
de Gdbelin, could throw no light on the aflSnities of
European idioms, it was because there was wanting
a standard of comparison which should explain their
divergence. The sacred books of India concealed this
standard ; it lay there unknown and unexpected,
until this century discovered it and realised its im-
portance.

Sanscrit, the language of the Brahmans, known
before our era to the Buddhists of China, had been
studied from the eighth century by Persian, Arab,
and Turkish translators. . Some fragments of its rich
literature had even reached us and have remained in
our tales and apologues. But although towards the
end of the fifteenth century Filippo Sachetti had
noted some points of resemblance between Italian
and Indian words, it is doubtful that even the name
of Sanscrit was known in Europe before the middle of
the eighteenth century.

Vasco di Gama, meanwhile, had landed in Calicut
in 1498; the Portuguese missions, throwing them-
selves at once on the rich Indian prey, must have
learned the language of the country, Tamil, and from
the year 1559 the priests of Goa knew enough of the
doctrines of India to invite the Brahmans to public
controversy. In 1606, Roberto de Nobili, who dis-
guised himself as a Brahman, and cleverly presented
himself as the interpreter of a fourth Veda, read in
the original the Laws of Manu and the Puranas. It
was doubtless under his influence that the Ezftr-



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The Indo' Europeans. 231

Veidam was composed in India, a Christian imita-
tion of the Vedas, which holds a certain place in the
erudition of Voltaire.

Fr. Pons in 1740 sent to Fr. Duhalde an exact
description of the four Vedas, of the grammatical
treatises, and of. the six great systems of philosophy.
Lastly, in 1767, another Frenchman, Fr. Coeurdoux,
sent to the Abb^ Barth^lemy, who in 1763 had
asked him for some historical information, two papers
on the analogies and the kinship of the Samscroiitan
language with Greek, Latin, German, and Sclavonic ;
he gave four lists of similar words and grammatical
forms, noted the presence of the augment in Sanscrit
and of the a privative ; he refused to attribute to
borrowing and commercial dealings resemblances which
affected not only isolated terms, but the formation of
the words themselves. If these precious documents
had been made public, France would have had the
honour to inaugurate the comparative study of Indo-
European languages. Unfortunately they remained
buried in the archives of the Academy, and only
appeared in 1808, at the end of a memoir of Anquetil
Duperron. In the interval science had progressed ;
England and Germany had made the discovery which
might have belonged to us.

The afl5nities recognised by Hahled, 1778, Sir
William Jones, Paulin de Saint-Barthelemy (Philippe
Wesdin), 1790, were admitted by Lord Monboddo
(1792— 1795). Dugald Stewart, it is hard to say
why, was obstinate in denying the existence of San-
scrit. But his incredulity was unavailing against the
grammars published from 1790 to 1836 by Wesdin,
Colebrooke, Carey, Wilkins, Forster, Yates, Wilson,
Bopp, Benfey ; against the texts edited, beginning in



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232 Distribution of Languages and Races.

1784, by the first Asiatic Society, founded at Calcutta.
The contrary exaggeration prompted the enthusiastic
Oriental scholars to regard Sanscrit as a univ^ersal
mother-tongue. Sir William Jones avoided this error;
he supposed for Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin a common
source, which perhaps, he says, exists no longer.
Modern science has confirmed his hypothesis, and,
while recognising the general priority of the Sanscrit
forms, notes in the other idioms of the family peculi-
arities which cannot be traced farther back, which
are, so to speak, collateral, and point to the necessary
existence of an earlier language, of a type which is
yet visible through the alterations suflFered by its
various forms.

While the mysteries of India were being revealed
to English investigators, two vast collections, the " Cata-
logue " of Hervas, and the " Mithridates '' of Adelung,
came to furnish philology with the treasure of facts
which alone can change hypothesis into certainty.
Hervas, a Spanish Jesuit, and a missionary in Ame-
rica, collected three hundred vocabularies and thirty
grammars, discovered the unity of the Malay group,
the independence of Basque, the relationship of
Hungarian, Lapp, Finnish, and suspected the relation-
ship of Greek and Sanscrit. His work, in six volumes,
dates from 1800. The "Mithridates," founded in part
on the "Catalogue," in part on vocabularies collected by
order of Catherine II., appeared from 1 806 to 1 8 1 7.
Adelung died in 1 809, but his son finished the work.
The classification of languages could thenceforward go
on with a more rapid and assured step and in the
right direction. The most brilliant, the richest, the
most vigorous group, that which was the first to be
clearly defined, claiming for itself the place till then



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The IndO'Europeans. 233

abandoned to the Semites, was the group to which
our European languages belong. In 1808, the poet
Frederic Schlegel, who had studied Sanscrit under
Hamilton (i 801—1802), constituted cleariy, in his
book on the " Language and Wisdom of the Hindus,"
the Indo-Germanic family. Though the work is out
of date, like the symbolism of Kreutzer and of Herder
which inspired it, though the bold guesses of the
author have fallen before the demonstrations of gram-
matical analysis, yet Schlegel is to Adelung, even to
Sir William Jones, what Copernicus is to Ptolemy.
He conceived a new worid ; he created one of the
richest domains of the human mind, or rather he
opened its doors. His book, which is no longer read,
gathers dust on the threshold of the science of which
he was the inaugurator.

Before studying the organism of the Indo-European
speech, such as we are able to reconstruct it from the
features common to its numerous varieties, it is indis-
pensable to glance over the immense area which it
covers, and to indicate, in space and time, the place
occupied by each of the groups of languages which
have issued from it. If we disregard its modern
annexes, which include the two Americas and Australia,
we shall find that it reigns from the mouths of the
Ganges to Iceland, and from Sweden to Crete, compre-
hending five-sixths of Hindustan, Afghanistan, Persia,
Armenia, three-quarters of Eussia, of Sweden, and of
Norway, and all the rest of Europe, except the Basque
country, Hungary, and a portion of Turkey in Europe.

In the extreme west, in Scotland, in Ireland, in
Wales, and in Brittany, we find the remains of the
Celtic group, generally subdivided into Gaelic (in-
cluding Erse and the dialect of the Isle of Man) and



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234 Distribution of Languages and Races,

Cymric (including Cornish and Breton). Save for a
few inscriptions which are not yet completely ex-
plained, these languages are only known to us by
relatively recent texts. ^

Some Irish glosses of the eighth century, and a few
Breton and Cornish documents of the eleventh and
thirteenth centuries, are the most ancient remains (all
the rest is hypothetical) of a language formerly spoken
in the north of Italy, throughout Gaul, and in the
British Isles, a language which, in spite of the illu-
sions of Celtic enthusiasts, has only left to the French
tongue a few names of places, historical names men-
tioned by the Latin writers, and about two hundred
and forty authentic words in addition to these.

Racially the Gauls and Celts can be distinguished.
The latter were round-headed, with dark hair and
eyes, of middle stature, and strongly built. The Gauls
were very tall, very fair, warlike and adventurous. The
Celts probably occupied before the dawn of history
the whole of Central Europe, the valley of the Danube,
Savoy, Auvergne, Brittany, Ireland; traces of them
are found in Roumania (or Dacia), in Austria, and in
Bavaria. Did these bring with them the Celtic dia-
lects, or did they receive them from the Gauls or Bel-
gians ? This question is insoluble, for it is impossible
to give the date of the arrival of the Gauls, who were
doubtless the first wave of that great flood which bore
the Teutons to the north of the Alps, the Latins to
the south. Towards the sixth century they certainly
occupied a great part of Northern Germany, dominated
Gaul from the Ehine provinces to the Pyrenees, and
Italy as far as the Po, perhaps as far as the Tiber.
They destroyed Rome at the beginning of the fourth
century, Delphi a hundred years later, and even pene-



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The Indo' Europeans. 235

trated into Asia Minor, into Qalatia. It was to put an
end to their incursions that the Romans, after having
with diflSculty subdued them in Cisalpine Gaul, an-
nexed the Transalpine provinces to the republic in the
middle of the first century before our era. It is well
known how rapidly the Gauls and the Celts adopted
the languages and civilisation of their conquerors.
Gallic, the most ancient of the Celtic dialects, had
completely disappeared by the fifth century of our era,
and the others are but the degenerate descendants
of an extinct language which some consider to be
related to Latin, others to Teutonic. However this
may be, their literature, which is fairly abundant, has
been carefully studied by Luzel, Gaidoz, D'Arbois de
Jubainville, and the Indo-European origin of their
vocabulary and grammar has been established by
Pictet {Be VAffiniU des Langv.^s Celtiques avec le Sans-
crit, 1 837), by Bopp (" The Celtic Languages from the
Point of View of Comparative Philology," 1838), and
by Zeuss {Grammatica Celtica, 1853).

The powerful German branch had quite another
destiny ; its historical existence is not very ancient,
but it has itself ramified into vigorous and cultivated
branches which cover a great part of northern Conti-
nental Europe, the British Isles, and the United States.
The earliest known name of the Germans or Teutons
(Teotisk) seems to be Bastarnes. From the year 182
B.C., they wandered between the Niemen and the Khine,
from the Alps to the Black Sea. Soon appeared the
Teutons of Marius, the Suevi of Ariovistus, then the
Germans of Varus, the Quadi, Alamanni, Franks, of
Marcus Aurelius, Probus, and Julian. Owing to the
strange lack of curiosity in the ancients, nothing of the
earliest times of the German languages has come down



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236 Distribution of Languages and Races.

to us. By a fortunate chance, a precious manuscript of
the fifth century, preserved at Upsal, the Codex Argen-
tevs, has retained for us the fragments of a Gothic trans-
lation of the Bible. The author was a Cappadocian,
brought up among the Western Goths on the Lower
Danube, and under the name of Ulfilas he became their
bishop and their chief (3 1 1—38 1). The Goths, Wisi-
goths, and Ostrogoths, who played so fatal a part in the
sad drama of the fall of the Roman empire, were the
rearguard of the German invasion; they barred the
passage between the Black Sea and the Baltic. Under
the shock of the Slav or Wendic invasion, in the year
77 of our era, they were driven partly into Sweden, and
in part between the Dniester and the Balkans, whence
they hurled themselves upon Gf eece, Italy, and Southern
Gaul. Gothic became extinct in the ninth century.
By its less mutilated forms it may be classed almost at
the same stage as Latin and Greek ; it is not the father,
but the elder brother of the other Teutonic dialects ;
its relationship with the Scandinavian languages and
the Low Dutch dialects is specially marked.

The most anciently cultivated of the Scandinavian
idioms, Norse or Norrois, carried to Iceland in the
ninth century by pagans fleeing from the Christian
propaganda, has preserved for us the most precious
traditions on the mythology of the North. The Hliods
and the Quidas, which were recited in the seventh and
eighth centuries in Norway before the emigration,
were collected in the eleventh in the poetical Edda of
Soemund. The prose Edda of Snorri Sturleson in the
following century, and then numerous Sagas, complete
the cycle of national legends, which are for the most
part common to all the Teutonic tribes. Danish and
Swedish, which developed side by side with Norse,



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The Indo-Etiropeans, 237

form independent though nearly allied branches of the
Scandinavian family.

In the north of Germany there are certain spoken
dialects which are no longer written, Platt-Deutsch or
Low Dutch, which are intermediate between Scandi-
navian, German, and English. This was the language
of Wittikind, and two manuscripts of the eighth cen-
tury have transmitted to us a Christian poem written
at this epoch for the conversion of the Saxons, the Hd-
jand or " Saviour." Frisian, cultivated in the twelfth
century, Flemish, the language of the Burgundian
court in the fifteenth century j^ and its twin, Dutch, be-
long to the same group, and are intimately connected
with Anglo-Saxon. The English tongue, which has
received from Latin and French more than half of its
rich vocabulary, is none the less essentially Germanic
in what remains to it of grammar and in the core of
the language. It was introduced in the fifth and
sixth centuries by the Jutes and the Angles. Anglo-
Saxon, very nearly allied to Gothic, is represented
by the epic poem of Beowulf, which is attributed to
the seventh century ; it was spoken until the time
of William the Conqueror (1066). Thanks to the
simplification which is the result of time, this old
idiom has renewed its youth ; the language of Shake-
speare, of Bacon, of Walter Scott, and of Shelley has
produced a magnificent literature, and has spread itself
over the whole earth. It is the conquering idiom.

The Teutonic tribes destined to form the German
nation, properly so called, have gone through many
vicissitudes, which partly account for the absence of
ancient documents in their dialects. That which the
Romans and the Gauls called the Germanic invasion
was commonly merely a forced emigration under the



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238 Distribution of Languages and Races,

double pressure of the Slavs and the Huns. From the
fifth to the sixteenth century there were no Germans
in Eastern Germany. Slavs occupied Silesia and
bordered on Saxony ; the Avari approached the Rhine
and harassed the frontiers of Charlemagne. Inde-
pendent Germany in the eighth century was reduced
to Saxony, then conquered and annexed by the Frankish
emperor. The Franks themselves, who had spread in
great numbers over the Rhine provinces, were, so to
speak, lost in the Latin empire, to which one of their
families, which was much crossed with Belgian blood,
had furnished the chiefs. And though the kings of
Austrasia had kept their national dialect, although
Charlemagne spoke it and took care to collect Ger-
manic songs and traditions, the domain of the true
Teuton was extremely limited. It comprehended Ala-
man, Bavarian, Suabian, and Frankish dialects. The
Frankish of the Merovingians and of Charlemagne
no doubt held the first rank in Old High German.
We may mention, as belonging to this period, the text
of the sermon pronounced by Charles the Bald in 843
before the battle of Fontenay, and, in the tenth cen-
tury, a poem which celebrates the victory of Louis
III. and of Carloman over the Normans.

In the thirteenth century Suabian prevailed and
constituted Middle High German ; it was the language
of the Minnesingers, and has been rendered famous by
the creators of the national poem of the Nibelungen,
Finally, literary German arose with the translation of
the Bible by Luther, as did classical Arabic with the
Koran, and became the universal language of a far
larger Germany. I need not praise German poetry,
philosophy, and science. But we may be permitted to
regret, in language as in religion, the extreme timidity



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The Indo' Europeans. 239

of the Reform. Luther did not venture to rid the
language of the silent or nasal terminations, of the
clumsy construction, of the relics of declension which
trouble the ear and weary the mind.

The northern provinces of Prussia were long occupied
by the Letts and Lithuanians, who had taken the
place of the Vandals, the Heruli, and the Lombards.
The greater part of them were attached to Germany
by conquest, by the crusade of the knights of the
Teutonic order. Russian Lithuania shared the fate
of Poland. The Lettic group, interesting by its archaic
forms, is only known to us, as so often happens, by
modern documents. It comprehends Old Prussian,
which became extinct in the seventeenth century, and
is represented by the eight hundred words of a lexi-
con of the fifteenth century, and by a catechism
dated 1561. On the frontier of Eastern Prussia and
in Russian Lithuania, about 150,000 people speak
Lithuanian, which is often better preserved than
Sanscrit itself. Its literature consists of the works of
a poet, Donalisius (17 14— 1780); a few prose fables
have also been collected, together with proverbs and
popular songs. Lettic, which is more corrupt, is
spoken in the north of Courland and in the south of
Livonia by about a million of people.

These languages are akin to one of the largest
groups of the whole family, the Wendic or Slav group,
which came into Europe during the first five centuries
of our era ; it is divided into two great branches.
Eastern and Western. The first includes Russian,
Great Russian in West Central Russia ; Little Russian,
Rusniac, or Ruthene in the south of Russia and even
into Austria (spoken by fourteen millions of people ;
there are documents of the eleventh century), Ser-



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240 Distribution of Languages and Races,

vian, Croatian, Slovenic, and Bulgarian, of which the
most ancient form is to the whole group what Gothic
is to the German dialects; modern Bulgarian is, on
the contrary, very much altered. Old Bulgarian or
ecclesiastical Slav, which Miklosich, the author of the
Wendic grammar, declared to be the father of all the
Slav idioms {lingua Palceo'-Slovenica) was fixed in the
ninth centurj by the apostles Cyrillus and Methodus
in their translation of the Bible. Slovenic has left
fragments which date from the tenth century.

The western branch covered from the seventh to
the ninth century vast districts of Germany in which
only German is now known: Pomerania, Mecklen-
burg, Brandenburg, Saxony, Western Bohemia, Austria,
Styria, and Northern Carinthia. Though now much
restricted, it can still boast numerous dialects ; among
others the Wendic of Lusatia, which is dying out,
Tzech or Bohemian, which is very vigorous (ten mil-
lions), of which a variety, Slovac, is found in Hungary ;
lastly, Polish (ten millions), of which the very important
literature begins at the end of the tenth century, and
numbers, from the twelfth onwards, many chroniclers
and poets. Tzech has been cultivated from the eighth
century ; its first documents are the celebrated manu-
scripts of Kralovdor and of Zelenohora, discovered in
1 8 17. Since they date from the transition period
between Christianity and Paganism, they are as valuable
to the student of mythology as to the philolo<^ist.
The time of Huss gave great prominence to Tzech
letters ; but conquered and given over to the Jesuits,
Bohemia's language was proscribed ; it has, however,
been revived from the end of the last century. The
relatively modem cultivation of the Slav languages
does not alter the fact that they date from the earliest



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