[85] See Farrand, The American Nation, and E. S. Payne, History of the New World called America, and note footnote to § 1 of this chapter.
[86] These are discussed compactly, but with very special knowledge, by Sir Harry Johnston in his little book on The Opening up of Africa, in the Home University Library. The student who finds this subject of philological history interesting, should read the introduction to the same writer’s Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages.
[87] The Polynesians appear to be a later eastward extension of the dark whites or brown peoples. See again § 4 of chap. xiii.
[88] “The Keltic group of languages, of which it has been said that they combined an Aryan vocabulary with a Berber (or Iberian) grammar.” Sir Harry Johnston. See also Sir John Rhys, The Welsh People, Mac Neilh’s Phases in Irish History, and various articles by Prof. Stewart Macalister in the Irish Monthly (1917-1919).
[89] See Schrader (translated by Jevons), Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, p. 404. But though the word Aryan was undoubtedly in its original application the name only of the Indo-Iranian people, it has been used in modern discussion for more than half a century in the wider sense. A word was badly wanted for that purpose, and “Aryan” was taken; failing “Aryan” we should be obliged to fall back on “Indo-Germanic” or “Indo-European,” terms equally open to objection and ugly and clumsy to employ.
[90] But these may have been an originally Semitic people who learnt an Aryan speech.
[91] On this point see Perry, An Ethnological Study of Warfare, vol. lxi., Mem. Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc., and also published separately 1917.—G. Wh.
[92] Fools, I think, were not wits, but deformed idiots, whom the company teased and laughed at. Certainly so in Roman and mediæval times. They do not occur in the Hellenic Age, except at courts in Asia Minor; but they must have been present in pre-Hellenic kingdoms; cf. end of Iliad I., where the gods laugh consumedly not at Hephaestus’ wit, but at his lameness. The idealized Fool of Shakespeare is, like the idealized Hermit of the romances, the invention of later days.—G. M
[93] The Aryans developed their languages and their ballads and epics between 10,000 B.C. and the historical period. Very much later in time, probably within the last 3,000 years, the nomadic Mongolian peoples of Asia began to develop their Ural-Altaic speech, under similar conditions, by similar poetic uses. Later we shall note the presence of bards at the court of Attila the Hun.
[94] It is suggested in the text that blind men became bards: Myres says that bards were (artificially) blinded to stop them from going elsewhere—the tribe wanted to keep them. The poetic touch is that “the Muses” blind the poet. Not a bit of it. (Homer, being a blind bard, describes things by sound—the twanging arrow, the far-thundering sea, the noise of the chariot going through the gate. He is audile, not visual.)—E. B.