Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

And we have also improved our measure of the isolation of the—

III. Basques.—Anatomically these are Caucasian so-called. Philologically, they are the only members of the group to which they belong, and that group is the highest recognized. They are like a species in natural history, which is the only one of its genus, the genus being the only one of its order, and the order being so indeterminate as to have no higher class to which it is subordinate.

IV. The Albanians are in the same predicament.

This is the state of classification which pre-eminently inspires us with the ambition of making higher groups; higher groups in philology, since in anatomy we have them ready-made—i. e. expressed by the terms Mongolian and Caucasian. The school which has made the most notable efforts in this way is the Scandinavian. In England it is, perhaps, better appreciated than in Germany, and in Germany better than in France.

I think it had great truth in fragments. It will first be considered on its philological side. Rask—the greatest genius for comparative philology that the world has seen—exhibited the germs of it in his work on the Zendavesta. Herein his hypothesis was as follows. The geologist will follow him with ease. Just as the later formations, isolated and unconnected of themselves, lie on an earlier, and comparatively continuous, substratum of secondary, palæozoic or primary antiquity, so do the populations speaking Celtic, Gothic, Slavonic, and Classical languages. Conquerors and encroachers wherever they came in contact with stocks alien to their own, they made, at an early period of history, nine-tenths of Europe and part of Asia their own. But before them lay an aboriginal population—before them in the way of time. This consisted of tribes, more or less related to each other, which filled Europe from the North Cape to Cape Comorin and Gibraltar—progenitors of the Laplanders on the north, and the progenitors of the Basques of the Pyrenees on the south—all at one time continuous. This time was the period anterior to the invasion of the oldest of the above-mentioned families. More than this—Hindostan was similarly peopled; and, by assumption, the parts between Northern Hindostan and Europe.

Such the theory. Now let us look to the present distribution. Almost all Europe is what is called Indo-European, i.e. Celtic, Gothic, Slavonic, or Classical. But it is not wholly so. In Scandinavia we have the Laps; in Northern Russia the Finns; on the junction of Spain and France the Basques. These are fragments of the once continuous Aborigines—separated from each other by Celts, Goths, and Slavonians. Then, as to India. In the Dekhan we have a family of languages called the Tamul—isolated also. Between each of these points the population is homogeneous as compared with itself; heterogeneous as compared with the tribes just enumerated. But there was once a continuity—even as the older rocks in geology are connected, whilst the newer ones are dissociated.

Such was the hypothesis of Rask; an hypothesis to which he applied the epithet Finnic—since the Finn of Finland was the type and sample of these early, aboriginal, hypothetically continuous, and hypothetically connected tongues. The invasion, however, of the stronger Indo-Europeans broke them up. Be it so. It was a grand guess; even if wrong, a grand and a suggestive one. Still it was but a guess. I will not say that no details were worked out. Some few were indicated.

Points which connected tongues so distant as the Tamul and the Finn were noticed—but more than this was not done. Still, it was a doctrine which, if it were proved false, was better than a large per-centage of the true ones. It taught inquirers where to seek the affinities of apparently isolated languages; and it bade them pass over those in the neighbourhood and look to the quarters where other tongues equally isolated presented themselves.

I have mentioned Rask as the apostle of it. Arndt, I am told, was the originator. The countrymen, however, of Rask have been those who have most acted on it.