At the same time, if I presume to affiliate the Hellic nation upon any Eastern parentage, and, again, to suggest relationships between that nation and others, which had also migrated from the first nurseries of man towards the West, it will, I hope, be understood, that all such propositions are asserted, not only as not demonstrable, but as likewise being, even within their own limits, those of merely probable truth, subject, by an admission tacitly carried all along, to every kind of qualification. The succession and intermixture of races, the combinations of language, the sympathetic and imitative communication of ideas and institutions, form a mass of phenomena complex enough, and difficult to describe, even by contemporaries; how much more so by the aid only of those faint and scattered rays that we can now find cast upon them.
Let us then proceed to consider what aid can be had from other sources in support of those presumptions, arising out of the text of Homer, which tend to connect the Hellenes of his day, and the Achæans as their leading tribe, with the East.
And here we may look first, as far as regards the general outlines of race and language, to the ethnological evidences afforded by the course of migration from Central Asia over Europe.
Next, to the evidence of those among ancient authors, who have taken notice of this diffusion in such a manner as in any degree to guide us towards the sources of the great factors of the Greek nation.
After that, we will inquire whether the names themselves, which are employed in Homer for the contemporary Greeks, can, by comparison with cognate names elsewhere, afford us any light.
And lastly, whether in the quarter to which these lines of information would lead us, we can discover any of those resemblances of manners and character with the Greeks which, if found, would afford the most satisfactory corroboration to the argument in favour of the derivation of one from the other.
The labours of ethnologists have associated together in one great family, at first called Indo-Germanic, and then Indo-European, but threatening to expand even beyond the scope of that comprehensive name, a mass of leading languages from the Celtic regions in the west to the plains of India in the east.
High German and Low German races.
This great family, says Dr. Donaldson[894], divides itself into two groups. To these two groups respectively belong the Low German and the High German tongues: the former spoken in the plain countries to the north of Europe, the latter in the more mountainous countries to the south. The Low German languages contain evidence of greater antiquity, and those who speak them appear to have been driven onward in their migrations by the High Germans following them: the latter entering Europe by Asia Minor, the former to the north of the Euxine.
The distinction runs back to the earlier seat of the race in Ariana or Iran, a portion of Asia which may be loosely defined as lying between the Caspian and the Indian ocean to the north and south, the Indus and the Euphrates to the east and west. Within these limits are to be found two forms of language, holding the same relation to one another as that which subsists between the High German and Low German tongues; the first, corresponding with the High German, was spoken among the countries of the south-west, where lies Persia proper, and the other in its more northern and eastern portions, of which Media formed a central part. The population of this great tract issued forth in the direction of the south-east, over the northern parts of India; and again towards Asia Minor and Europe, in the direction of the north-west. Those who came first proceeded from Media, and supplied the base of what have been called, the Low German nations: Sarmatians, Saxons, Getæ (or Scythians or Goths). The language of these emigrants was that which, when it assumed an organized or classical form, and with due allowance for changes which the lapse of time must have introduced, became the tongue now best represented, at least as a literary language, by the Sanscrit.