I submit there is but one measure here—the existing state of things as either known to ourselves, or known to contemporaries capable of learning them at the period nearest the time under consideration. This we examine as the effect of some antecedent cause—or series of causes. Ποῦ στῶ; says the scholar. On the dictum of such or such an author. Ποῦ στῶ; says the Archimedean ethnologist. On the last testified fact.
Of the unsatisfactory character of anything short of contemporary testimony in the identification of ancient nations, the pages and pages that nine-tenths of the historians bestow upon the mysterious Pelasgi is a specimen. Add Niebuhr to Müller, and Thirlwall to Niebuhr—Pelion to Ossa, and Olympus to Pelion—and what facts do we arrive at—facts that we may rely on as such, facts supported by contemporary evidence, and recorded under opportunities of being ascertained? Just the three recognized by Mr. Grote; viz. that their language was spoken at Khreston—that it was spoken at Plakeæ—that it differed, in some unascertained degree, from the Greek.
This is all that the ethnologist recognizes; and from this he argues as he best can. Every fact, less properly supported by either first-hand or traceable evidence, he treats with indifference. It may be good in history; but it is not good for him. He has too much use to put it to, too much to build upon it, too much argument to work out of it, to allow it to be other than unimpeachable.
Again—Tacitus carries his Germania as far as the Niemen, so as to include the present countries of Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg, West and East Prussia, and Courland. Is this improbable in itself? No. The area is by no means immoderately large. Is it improbable when we take the present state of those countries in question? No. They are German at present. Is it improbable in any case? and if so, in what? Yes. It becomes improbable when we remember that the present Germans have been as unequivocally and undoubtedly recent immigrants for the parts in question, as are the English of the Valley of the Mississippi, and that at the beginning of the historical period the whole of them were Slavonic, with nothing but the phraseology of Tacitus to prevent us from believing that they always had been so. But it is also improbable that so respectable a writer as Tacitus should be mistaken. Granted. And here begins the conflict of difficulties. Nevertheless, the primary ethnological fact is the state of things as it existed when the countries under consideration were first accurately known, taken along with the probability or improbability of its having so existed for a certain period previous, as compared with the probability or improbability of the migrations and other assumptions necessary for its recent introduction.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The value of Tacitus as an authority is minutely investigated in an ethnological edition of the Germania by the present writer, now in course of publication. The object of the present chapter is merely to show the extent to which the science in question is of recent, rather than ancient, origin.
[2] Barr’s Translation, vol. iv. p. 191.