Intermixture.—It is certain that the language of England is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and that the remains of the original Keltic are unimportant. It is by no means so certain that the blood of Englishmen is equally Germanic. A vast amount of Kelticism, not found in our tongue, very probably exists in our pedigrees.
The ethnology of France is still more complicated. Many writers make the Parisian a Roman on the strength of his language; whilst others make him a Kelt on the strength of certain moral characteristics combined with the previous Kelticism of the original Gauls.
Spanish and Portuguese, as languages, are derivatives from the Latin. Spain and Portugal, as countries, are Iberic, Latin, Gothic, and Arab in different proportions.
Italian is modern Latin all the world over: yet surely there must be much Keltic blood in Lombardy, and much Etruscan intermixture in Tuscany.
In the ninth century every man between the Elbe and the Niemen spoke some Slavonic dialect. They now nearly all speak German. Surely the blood is less exclusively Gothic than the speech.
I have not fallen in with any evidence which induces me to consider the great Majiar invasion of Hungary as anything other than a simple military conquest. If so—and the reasoning applies to nine conquests out of ten—the female half of the ancestry of the present speakers of the Majiar language must have been the women of the country. These were Turk, Slavonic, Turko-Slavonic, Romano-Slavonic, and many other things besides—anything, in short, but Majiar.
The Grisons language is of Roman origin.
So is the Wallachian of Wallachia and Moldavia.
Nevertheless, in each country, the original population must be, more or less, represented in blood by the present.
This is enough to show what is meant by intermixture of blood, the extent to which it demands a special investigation of its own, and the number of such investigations required in the ethnology of Europe. Indeed, it is the subject of a special department of the science, conveniently called minute ethnology.