How great is this displacement? The history of only a few out of many of the conquering nations tells us a pregnant story in this respect. It shows us what has taken place within the comparatively brief span of the historical period. What lies beyond this it only suggests.
The Ugrians with one exception have ever suffered from the encroachments of others rather than been encroachers themselves. But the exception is a remarkable one.
It is that of the Majiars of Hungary, who, whatever claims they may set up for an extraction more illustrious than the one which they share with the Laplanders and Ostiaks, are unequivocally Ugrians—no Circassians, as has been vainly fancied, and no descendants from the Huns of Attila, as has been more reasonably supposed. This latter, however, is a supposition invalidated by the high probability of the warriors of the Scourge of God having been Turk.
Be this, however, as it may, their advent into Europe is no earlier than the tenth century, the country which they left having been the present domain of the Bashkirs.
The amount of displacement effected by the Kelts is difficult to determine. We hear of them in so many places that the family seems to be ubiquitous. Utterly disbelieving the Cimmerii of the Cimmerian Bosphorus to have been Keltic, and doubtful about both the Scordisci of the ancient Noricum, and the Celtiberians of ancient Spain, I am inclined to limit the Keltic area at its maximum extension, to Venice westwards, and to the neighbourhood of Rome southwards. But this is not enough. They may have been aboriginal in parts which they seem to have invaded as immigrants. This complicates the question and makes it as hard to ascertain the extent of their encroachments on others, as the extent to which others have encroached on them—a point for further notice.
The Goths have ever extended their frontier—a frontier which I believe to have once reached no farther than the Elbe[25]. From thence to the Niemen they have encroached at the expense of the Sarmatians—Slavonic or Lithuanic as the case may be.
In the time of Tacitus[25] it is highly probable that there were no Goths north of the Eyder. Since then, however, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have been wrested from earlier occupants and become Scandinavian.
The Ugrian family originally extended as far south as the Valdai Mountains. This part of their area is now Russian.
The conquests of Rome have given languages derived from the Latin to Northern Italy, the Grisons, France, Spain and Portugal, Wallachia and Moldavia.
This brings us to another question, that of—