d. The Basques of Biscay and Gascony, i.e., the Western Pyrenees; once spread over the whole of the Spanish peninsula, and for that reason commonly called Iberian—
e. The Skipetar, or Albanians of Albania.
I am taking, as aforesaid, the populations in the order of convenience, and the next is
f. The Keltic.[1] This stock was indigenous to the water-systems of the Loire, the Seine, and the Rhone, in other words, to the whole of France north of the Garonne; to the south of which river lay the Iberians. From Gaul it spread to Great Britain. Its present representatives are the Bretons of Brittany, the Welsh, the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland, and the Manxmen of the Isle of Man—
g. The Gothic or German—
h. The Sarmatian, or Slavono-Lithuanic, containing the Slavonians and Lithuanians of Russia, Poland, Bohemia, Servia, Carinthia, Lithuania, with other less important areas, and lastly—
i. The classical or Greco-Latin stock of Italy and Greece, completing the list of the European stocks.
These three are more closely allied to each other than any of the previous ones. They are also nearer the Keltic; so much so, that a single class has been made out of the four, a class called Indo-European. The study, however, of the value of classes is in its infancy. The real fact that they are allied to an extent to which the others are not, is important.
Such are the existing groups; but when we consider how small is the number of the Basques, the only present representatives of the great Iberian class, and that their preservation to the present time is mainly due to the accidental circumstances of their occupancy of a stronghold in the Pyrenees, a new series of facts is suggested. The likelihood of stocks now extinct having once existed, presents itself; and with it, a fresh question.
The same suggestion arises when we look at the country occupied by the intrusive families of the Osmanlis and the Majiars of Rumelia and Hungary. The populations here are comparatively new-comers; yet it was no uninhabited tracts that they appropriated. Who was there before them? Perhaps some members of one of the stocks now existing. Perhaps, a wholly different family now extinct.