In saying this, I by no means make the disparaging insinuation that the historian is unduly credulous, or that the ethnologist is a model of caution. Neither assertion would be true. The ethnologist, however, like a small capitalist, cannot afford so much credit as his fellow-labourer in the field of Man. He is like a traveller, who, leaving home at the twilight of the evening, must be doubly cautious when he comes to a place where two roads meet. If he take the wrong one, he has nothing but the long night before him; and his error grows from bad to worse. But the historian starts with the twilight of the dawn; so that the further he goes the clearer he finds his way, and the easier he rectifies any previous false turnings. To argue from cause to effect is to journey in the dim light of the early morn till we reach the blazing noon. To argue from effect to cause is to change the shades of evening for the gloom of night.
As Scotland is to Ireland, so is Gaul to England. From the Shannon to the Loire and Rhine, the stock is one; one, but not indivisible—the British branch (containing the Welsh) and the Gaelic (containing the Scotch) forming its two primary sections.
Next to the Kelts come the Goths; the term Gothic being a general designation taken from a particular people. Germany is the native land of these; just as Gaul was of the Kelts. Hence, they lie to the north of that family, as well as to the west of it. Intrusive above all the other populations of the earth, the branches of the Gothic tribes have brought themselves in contact and collision with half the families of the world. First, they encroached upon the Kelts, and, for a time, the tide of conquest fluctuated. It was the Rhine which was the disputed frontier—disputed as much in Cæsar’s time as our own. Next, they revenged themselves on the aggressions of Rome; so that the Ostro-goths conquered Italy, and the Visi-goths Spain. Then came the Franks of France, and the Anglo-Saxons of England. In the ninth and tenth centuries the edges of the German swords turned another way, and Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Prussia, and part of Courland, Silesia, Lusatia, and Saxony were wrested from the Sarmatians, lying to the west and south-west.
It is not unusual to raise the two divisions of the great Sarmatian stock to the rank of separate substantive groups—independent of each other, though intimately allied. In this case Lithuania, Livonia, and Courland contain the smaller division, which is conveniently and generally called the Lithuanic; the population being agricultural, scanty, limited to the country in opposition to the towns, and unimportant in the way of history; a population, which in the tenth and eleventh centuries was cruelly conquered under the plea of Christianity by the German Knights of the Sword—rivals in rapacity and bloodshed to their equivalents of the Temple and St. John—a population which, at the present moment, lies like iron between the hammer and the anvil, between Russia and Prussia; and which, for one brief period only, under the Jagellons, exercised the equivocal rights of a dominant and encroaching family—for one brief period only within the true historical æra. How far it may have done more at an earlier epoch remains to be considered.
The other branch is the Slavonic; comprising the Russians, the Servians, the Illyrians, the Slovenians of Styria and Carinthia, the Slovaks of Hungary, the Tsheks of Bohemia, and the Lekhs (or Poles) of Poland, Mazovia, and Gallicia. A great deal is said about the future prospects of this stock; the doctrine of certain able historians being, that as they are the youngest of nations—a term somewhat difficult to define—and have played but a small part in the world’s history hitherto, they have a grand career before them; a prospect more glorious than that of the Romano-Keltic French, or the Germanic English of the Old and New World. I doubt the inference, and I doubt the fact on which it rests. But of this more anon. The Sarmatian Slavono-Lithuanians are the fourth great family of Europe. They certainly lie in the line of migration which peopled Ireland from Asia.
South of these lie two branches of a fresh stock, divided from each other, and presenting the difficult phænomenon of geographical discontinuity conjoined with ethnological affinity. Separated from the most southern Slavonians by the two intrusive populations of the Wallachians and the Majiars, and by the primitive family of the Albanians, come—
- a. The Greeks—and separated from the Slavonians of Carinthia and Bohemia by intrusive Germans at the present moment, and by the mysterious Etruscans in ancient times, come—
- b. The Italians.—We may call these two families Latin or Hellenic instead of Greek and Italian, if we choose; and as the distribution of nations is best studied during the earliest periods of their history, the former terms are the better.
Before we can consider the classification of these four families—Ugrian, Kelt, Gothic, and Græco-Latin—some fresh observations and certain new facts are requisite.
The ethnology of Europe is undoubtedly more difficult than that of any of the three other quarters of the globe—perhaps more so than that of all the world besides. It has not the character of being so—but so it is. The more we know the more we may know. Illustrated as is Europe by the historian and the antiquarian, it has its dark holes and corners made all the more visible from the illumination.
In the first place, the very fact of its being the home of the great historical nations has made it the scene of unparalleled displacements; for conquest is the great staple of history, and conquest and displacement are correlative terms. A greater portion of Europe can be shown to be held by either mixed or conquering nations than is to be found elsewhere—not that this absolutely proves the encroachments to have been greater; but that gives prominence to the greater degree in which they have been recorded. Hence, where in other parts of the world we shut up our papers and say de non apparentibus, &c., in Europe we are forced upon the obscurest investigations, and the subtlest trains of reasoning.