The question next arises, How is it that we find the Germans transplanted from the Hoang-Ho to the Rhine? We are told that, being driven out of China by the Turks, they poured into the European countries which the Celts or Western Aryans had already occupied. These latter had in the mean time gone out from the Asiatic cradle of the race, and following the course of the Indus to Hindostan and Persia, had, under the name of Chaldeans, overrun Armenia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt and North Africa, which latter they found inhabited by certain negro races, whereas in Egypt they discovered red-skins or Atlantides; which latter, by the way, form also our own aborigines. The intermixture of the Celts with these primitive races just named produced the Jews and Semitic people. At the time of the Celtic invasion Western Europe and Northern Africa were occupied by the race of the Atlantides, while the Mongolians, including also the Lapps, Finns and Huns, peopled the north of Europe and of Asia. The Celts pushed in between these two races, and only very much later the German people, driven out of China by the Turks, as we have said, arrived in Europe.
When, therefore, did these Cainist invasions of Germany take place? Obermüller says that the date must have been toward the epoch of the Roman conquests. Gallia was then inhabited in the south by the primitive Atlantid race of Ligurians and by the Greek colony of Massilia; in the centre by the Gaelags (Celts) or Gauls, who, pouring northward from Spain, had conquered it fifteen hundred years before the Christian era; and in the north by the Belgic Cimbrians, who had come from Germany, and who were designated under the name of Germans (Ghermann) or border-men, and who, though called Germani by Caesar and Tacitus, were yet not of the Cainist stock, but Celts. However, these Germans, whom the Romans encountered to their cost on the Rhine and Danube, were of the genuine Oriental Cainist stock, and these, after centuries of fierce struggle, they failed to conquer, though the Celts of Britain, Gaul and Spain, as well as all the old empires of the East, had fallen an easy prey to their victorious eagles.
It only remains to add that this invasion of Germany by Cain's progeny was accomplished in three streams. The Ases (Sachsons) directed themselves to the Elbe and Danube, and thence to the north; the Suevi, or Swabians, chose the centre and south of Germany; while the Goths did not rest till they had overrun Italy, Southern France and Spain. But each of these three main streams was composed of many tribes, whom the old writers catalogue without system, mixing both Celtic and Teutonic tribes under the general name of Germans; and it is only in modern days that the careless enumeration of the classic writers has been rejected, and a more scientific method substituted. It will be seen, in fine, that in the main Obermüller does not differ from accepted theories in German ethnology, which have long carefully dissevered the Celts from the Teutons, and assigned to each tribe with approximate accuracy its earliest fixed abode in Europe. It is the tracing back of the German race proper to the first-born of Adam, according to scriptural genealogy, which makes this theory curious and amusing.
To the work of M. Quatrefages we have only space to devote a paragraph. Originally contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes, it bears the marks in its inferences, if not in its facts, of being composed for an audience of sympathizing countrymen, rather than for the world of science at large. M. Quatrefages says that the first dwellers in Prussia were Finns, who founded the stock, and were in turn overpowered by the Slavs, who imposed their language and customs on the whole of the Baltic region. The consequent mixture of Finns and Slavs created a population wholly un-German; and what dash of genuine Germanism Prussia now has was subsequently acquired in the persons of sundry traders from Bremen, followed by a class of roving nobility, who entered the half-civilized country with their retainers in quest of spoils. Besides these elements, Prussia, like England and America, received in modern times an influx of French Huguenots; which M. Quatrefages naturally considers a piece of great good fortune for Prussia. Briefly, then, the French savant regards Prussia as German only in her nobility and upper-middle classes, while the substratum of population is a composition of Slav and Finn, and hence thoroughly anti-German. As, according to the old saying, if you scratch a Russian you will find a Tartar beneath, so, according to M. Ouatrefages, we may suppose that scraping a Prussian would disclose a Finn. The political inferences which he draws are very fanciful. He traces shadowy analogies between the tactics of Von Moltke's veterans and the warlike customs of the ancient Slavs, and suggests that the basic origin of the Prussian population may lead it to cultivate a Russian alliance rather than an Austrian, forgetting, apparently, that by his own admission the ruling-classes of Prussia are German in origin, ideas and sympathies.
L.S.
THE STEAM-WHISTLE.
While Mr. Ruskin was lately bewailing the bell-ringing propensity of mankind, the English Parliament and several American legislatures, city or State, were assaulting the greater nuisance of the steam-whistle, and trying to substitute bell-ringing for it. Mr. Ruskin's particular grievance was, that his own nerves were crispé by the incessant ding-dong of the church-bells of Florence summoning the devout to prayer, but he generalized his wrath. Possibly, he would have been less sensitive and fastidious regarding the musical carillons of the Italian city were he wont to dwell within ear-shot of an American factory or railroad-station. Not that Mr. Ruskin fails to appreciate—or, rather, to depreciate—railways in their connection with Italian landscapes; for, besides his series of complaints regarding the Florence bells, he denounces the railway from Rome to Naples, and the railway-tunnels under Monts Cenis and St. Gothard, and the railway-bridge leading into Venice, as enemies of the beautiful and picturesque in Nature. But it is the locomotive, independent of the shriek, that is his abomination; whereas a man less sensitive to sights, and (if possible) more sensitive to sounds, might pardon the cutting up of the landscape were his ear-drum spared from splitting.
Emerson asks, "What is so odious as noise?" But a Saturday Reviewer once devoted an elaborate essay to the eulogy of unmitigated noise, or rather to the keen enjoyment of it by children. People with enviable nerves and unenviable tastes often enjoy sounds in the ratio of their lack of melody—say, such everyday thoroughfare music as the slap and bang of coach-wheels on the cobble-stones; the creaking of street-cars round a sharp curve, like Milton's infernal doors "grating harsh thunder;" the squeaking falsettos of the cries by old-clothes' men, itinerant glaziers, fishmongers, fruiterers, tinkers and what not; the yells of rival coachmen at the railway-stations, giving one an idea of Bedlam; the street-fiddlers and violinists with horribly untuned instruments; the Italian open-air singers hoarsely shouting, "Shoo Fly" or "Viva Garibaldi! viva l'Italia!" the gongs beaten on steamboats and by hotel-runners at stations on the arrival of trains; the unearthly squeals and shrieks of new "musical instruments" sold cheap by street-peddlers; the horrible noise-producers which boys invent for the torture of nervous people—such, for example, as this present season's, which is happily styled "the devil's fiddle," or "the chicken-box," whose simplest form is an emptied tomato-can, with a string passed through the end and pulled with the rosined fingers. Now, that a man may be pleased with a rattle, even if it be only a car-rattle, is conceivable, but it is hard to understand how he can retain a relish for the squeal of a locomotive-whistle. The practice of summoning workmen to factories by this shrill monitor, of using it to announce the dinner-hour, the hour of resuming work after the nooning, and the hour of quitting work for the night, ought to be abolished everywhere. There is not the faintest excuse for it, because clocks and bells will do the same work exactly as well. On the other hand, the whistle causes perpetual irritation to the nervous, feeble and sick, and frequent cases of horses running away with fright at the sudden shriek, smashing property or destroying life.
Let us give moral aid and comfort to the campaign, Cisatlantic and Transatlantic, against the steam-whistle. In the local councils of Philadelphia, Camden and other cities it has been well opened in our country; in the House of Commons has been introduced a bill providing that "no person shall use or employ in any manufactory or any other place any steam-whistle or steam-trumpet for the purpose of summoning or dismissing workmen or persons employed, without the sanction of the sanitary authorities." They call this whistle, by the way, it would seem, the "American devil," for the Manchester Examiner congratulates its readers that the "American devil" has been taken by the throat, and ere long his yells will be heard no more.