That all connection was lost at a very early date between these two main streams is plain from another interesting little group of words. These are common to all the members of the north-western group, but quite unknown to the south-eastern, and perhaps the most interesting is mere, the Old English for ‘sea’, which is still used poetically of inland waters, and in the word mermaid, while its Latin form ‘mare’ is equally familiar to most educated Englishmen. From the distribution of this word among the Aryan nations, together with similar equations such as fish and piscis, we can deduce that these two groups of travellers had already separated before either of them reached the sea-board.
There is evidence, too, that this north-western group, comprising as it did the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, as well as of the Celts, Teutons, and Slavs, had reached before it dispersed a new country of forests, such as must have covered most of Northern and Western Europe at that time. At any rate we find words for trees—such as beech, elm, and hazel—and for birds—finch, starling, swallow, throstle—common to most of the languages spoken by their descendants, yet absent from Persian and Sanskrit. It was at this time, and amid these surroundings, that agriculture seems to have appeared among the north-western Aryans. The old Aryan word from which we have acre lost its former meaning of ‘any enclosed piece of land’ and acquired the new and special significance of tilled land, as in the Latin ‘ager,’ etc. Corn, furrow, bean, meal, ear of corn, and the verb to mow also date back to this period of our history.
And then the north-western stream again subdivided; and we will follow first of all that branch of it which dropped away southward into the Balkan peninsula and the islands of the Aegean. This time it is not a word, but a poet’s imagination which has fixed for us in a passage of considerable beauty the historic moment when this wave first lapped the farther shore, the prophetic shock of contact between Aryan settler and aborigine:
Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!
As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the Aegean isles;
And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,