Two different written languages exist among the German people; that of the Netherlands and German.
The Netherland language has given birth to three dialects—Dutch, Flemish, and Frieslandic.
The Dutch, in the seventeenth century, were the greatest maritime commercial people in the world, and founded at that period a certain number of colonies.
The Dutchman is by nature reserved and silent. Simplicity is the marked feature of his character. He possesses patriotic feeling in a high degree, and is capable of enthusiasm and devotion in the defence of his strange and curious territory, preserved from the sea by dykes and formidable constructions, and irrigated by innumerable canals, which form the ordinary means of communication, and which link together the seas and the rivers, as well as the towns.
English.—The English may be considered as resulting from a mixture of the Saxons and Angles with the people who inhabited the British Isles before the Saxon invasion.
Whence came and who were the Angles and Saxons?
According to Tacitus, the Angles were a small nation inhabiting the regions next the ocean. The Saxons, according to Ptolemy, dwelt between the mouths of the Elbe and Schleswig. About the fifth century after Christ, the Angles and Saxons invaded the British Isles, and mingled with the inhabitants, who then comprised Celts, Latins, and Arameans. During the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, fresh invasions of Great Britain, by the Normans and Danes, added to this blood, already so mixed, another foreign infusion.
From this medley of different peoples has sprung the English nation, in whom are found at the same time, the patient and persevering character, the serious disposition, and the love of family life, introduced by the Saxons, and which is the peculiarity of the German nature, combined with the lightness and impressionability of the Celt.
The physical type which is the result of this mixture, that is, the English type, corresponds with the combination of races we have specified. The head is in shape long and high, and is in this respect to be distinguished from the square heads of the Germans, particularly those of Suabia and Thuringia. The English generally possess a clear and transparent skin, chestnut hair, tall and slender figures, a stiff gait, and a cold physiognomy. Their women do not offer the noble appearance and luxurious figure of the Greek and Roman women; but their skins surpass in transparency and brilliancy those of the female inhabitants of all other European countries.