The main difficulty which Mr. Wright's hypothesis meets—and it does meet it—lies in the fact of the similarity between the Welsh and Armorican being too great for anything but a comparatively recent separation to account for. Nevertheless, even this portion of what may be called the Armorican hypothesis, is by no means incompatible with the doctrine of the present paper. The Celtic of Armorica may as easily have displaced the older Celtic of Britain (from which, by hypothesis, it notably differed) as it is supposed to have displaced the Latin.
I do not imagine this to have been the case; indeed I can see reasons against it, arising out of the application of Mr. Wright's own line of criticism.
I think it by no means unlikely that the argument which gives us the annihilation of the British of the British Isles, may also give us that of the Gallic of Gaul. Why should Armorica have been more Celtic than Wales? Yet, if it were not so, whence came the Armorican of Wales? I throw out these objections for the sake of stimulating criticism, rather than with the view of settling a by no means easy question.
[KELÆNONESIA.]
The dates of the four papers on this part of the world shew that the first preceded the earliest of the other three by as much as four years; a fact that must be borne in mind when the philological ethnography of New Guinea and the islands to the south and east of it is under notice. The vocabularies of each of the authors illustrated in papers 2 and. 3, more than doubled our previous data—Jukes' illustrating the language of islands between New Guinea and Australia, Macgillivray's those of the Louisiade Archipelago.
That there was a hypothesis at the bottom of No. 1 is evident. Neither is there much doubt as to the fact of that hypothesis being wrong.
I held in 1843 that, all over Oceania, there was an older population of ruder manners, and darker colour than the Malays, the proper Polynesians, and the populations allied to them; that, in proportion as these latter overspread the several islands of their present occupancy the aborigines were driven towards the interior; that in Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea &c. the original black race remained unmolested.
This view led to two presumptions;—both inaccurate;