races. When at last, at a comparatively late period, the Aryan nations themselves broke up and began to wander from their original seat, one body of them turned southward and invaded India, subduing the original inhabitants, and became the ancestors of the Hindoos proper, that is of the Sanskrit speaking tribes of Northern Hindostan; another detachment settled in Persia, where their descendants remain to this day, speaking a language derived from the ancient Zend dialect. These two branches together form what I have called the Eastern Aryans. The other great division of the same main stock turned westward, and not all at once, but by successive waves of migration found and occupied settlements in Europe.

The settled population of early Europe seems to have been of this Western Aryan race. The Southern branch of it I have ventured to call Pelasgian. If any scholar objects to that term I will explain that I merely use it in its widest and loosest sense to express that chain of Aryan tribes which spread in succession from east to west through the peninsulas and islands of the Mediterranean, thus occupying Greece, Illyria, Italy and Sicily, the coast of France, and most probably at least some part of Spain. North of them stretched the kindred Keltic race in its two branches of Gaels and Kymri, occupying not only those which we now consider Keltic countries, viz. Wales, the south west of Ireland, and the north west of Scotland, but all Ireland, all Great Britain, the whole of France except the southern coast, all Belgium, the whole of what is now south Germany, and onward into the mountain districts of Switzerland and the Tyrol. We know the history of the Mediterranean Aryans at Greece and Rome pretty clearly from about B.C. 500. The palmy days of the Kelts to the north of them were perhaps about the year B.C. 400, when not yet invaded by the Germans they became themselves the invaders, extending their frontiers southward, overrunning and occupying Lombardy, and even sacking Rome. But our present concern is not so much with their later exploits as with their earlier condition. What sort of people were these Western Aryans when they first occupied Europe? The answer I think as regards both Kelts and

Pelasgians must be the same.

Iron

They were not yet a highly civilized race, but they were certainly not savages. The three necessary arts of civilization, agriculture, weaving and metal working, were known and practised among them. Agriculture indeed was the very thing which distinguished them from their Turanian enemies. Then they did not clothe themselves in the skins of beasts, but wore woollen garments which their women spun and wove. And they certainly brought with them a knowledge of metal working. indeed, the hardest of the metals to smelt was unknown or rare, but they had bronze weapons and implements without which indeed they must have failed to clear ground for their husbandry amid the hitherto unbroken forests of Western Europe. As for their form of government it was that of a patriarchal chieftainship, where the ruler of each little tribe is at once the sovereign, and the real or supposed kinsman of his dependents, the form of government which we find in the Homeric poems, and which has existed almost to our our own time in the clans of the Scotch Highlands. The question of course arises, whether these Pelasgian and Keltic tribes of the Aryan stock were the first inhabitants of Europe. I believe that they were the first population. By this I mean that they were the first race who occupied the land, cut down forests, broke up the soil with the plough, built villages, and in course of time made some sort of roadway from one village to another. They were in short in Europe what the first settlers were in America or Australia. But it is equally clear that they were preceded by a people who were not settlers. Along all the sea coasts of Europe, and up most of the great rivers, but almost always near the water, there are to be found remains, for the most part sepulchral remains, of an earlier race of inhabitants. These remains consist of barrows and mounds of earth sometimes protected and supported by a cromlech or edifice of unhewn stones, with flint arrow heads and other weapons rudely fashioned either from stone or bone. There is no reason to suppose that any Aryan tribe even on its first entry into Europe was so destitute of the arts of life. But at present the only instances of primeval non-Aryan tribes in Europe are the Lapps, Finns, and Esthonians in the North Western

provinces of the Russian Empire, and the Basques among the Pyrenees in Spain. The Lapps, Finns, and Esthonians belong to the Turanian (or in the popular language the Tartar) stock which we have already mentioned. Whether the Basques are also Turanian is a question on which I shall have something to say by and bye. But some ethnologists, particularly in Denmark, have assumed that they are, and have in consequence adopted what is called the "Finnish hypothesis." That is to say they suppose that in the very earliest times, and before the coming of the Aryans there was a chain of scattered tribes of Finnish (or Turanian) race running all across Europe from Finland quite down to Spain, and when the Aryans came they broke the links of this chain and drove the Lapps, Finns, and Esthonians up into the north, and the Basques down to the South West, occupying all the centre for themselves. And this hypothesis I should be inclined to think very probable provided only it be understood that such scattered tribes must have been very scattered and not forming anything like what I have previously called a population. Such tribes must have wandered off early from their original seats, and it is easy to see how too much vagrancy would reduce them in the scale of civilization. First of all, if they were not going to stay in one place long enough to reap a crop, there would be no inducement to sow it, and the art of agriculture would go: they would roam about as a pastoral tribe with flocks and herds. But an outbreak of murrain among their cattle, or an attack by another tribe might destroy their flocks and herds, and they would be reduced to live as hunters by the chase. The art of weaving would die out of itself when they had no longer sheep whose wool they might weave. And metal working, the most difficult of the primary arts, would become almost impossible the first time they moved into a district where metallic ores were either scarce or difficult to recognize. Such I apprehend was the condition of the pre-Aryan inhabitants of Europe; a few scattered tribes of wandering savages, clothed in skins like the Esquimaux of the present day, and subsisting by hunting and still more by fishing. Though probably there was another reason besides the supply of food which made them remain

near the great water courses; that reason was, that they had no metal implements. In those days the weald of Kent, and the weald of Sussex must have been real forests as their name implies-the forest of Arden must have covered the spot where I am now standing; indeed almost the whole of Western Europe must have been covered with a dense forest growth almost impassable to men whose only axes were of flint; whereas the waters formed a ready-made road on which their canoes or coracles could take them where they pleased. Our experience in America and Australia enables us to see how certain it was that such wandering tribes would disappear on the incoming of a far more numerous, better equipped and more civilized race.

It seems clear however that except such wandering tribes, the Keltic and Pelasgic Aryans were the first settlers in Europe, and found the land unoccupied. Very different was the case with the next wave of Aryan emigration into Europe, that of the Gothic race. After the Kelts and Pelasgians had left their early Aryan home and set off for the West, we have no means of knowing how long it was before the other Aryan tribes in their turn broke up and set out on their travels. All we can tell is that some considerable time after the Kelts and Pelasgians had established themselves in Europe, these other branches of the same Aryan stock also found their way there, viz. the Gothic race and the Sarmatian race. The Gothic race includes in its southern or Teutonic division, the Germans of Germany, the Dutch and Flemings, and the main stock of the English, while its northern or Scandinavian division includes the Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians. The Sarmatian race includes, first the Lithuanians; these are a small people of no note in history, only a few hundred thousand peasants in Courland and Livonia, but they are exceedingly interesting to the philologist because their language of all European dialects is the one which most resembles the oriental Sanskrit; and then there are the Slavonians that is the Bohemians, Poles, Russians and all the tribes related to them down to Bulgaria, and the Egean Sea. According to their present distribution therefore the Gothic tribes lie cast of the Keltic, and the Sarmatian east

of the Gothic. But I am not sure that it would be safe to infer that they came into Europe exactly in that order. For instance, the usual account given of the Gothic race is that their northern division, the Scandinavians, came into Sweden and Norway through Finland and Lapland, and across the gulf of Bothnia, but that their southern, or Teutonic, division came into Germany through Courland and Prussia, and along the south coast of the Baltic. But I doubt whether this can be maintained, for two reasons: in the first place, if the Teutons and Scandinavians had separated so early and had come into Western Europe by separate routes, their languages would have diverged more; instead of sister tongues they would have been only cousins; in fact there would probably have been as much difference between German and Danish, as there is between German and Bohemian; and secondly, we should have to suppose that the Slavonians who in historical times have always been defeated by the Germans were at this early period able to defeat them and drive them westward. And this I do not believe, and therefore I have a private and particular theory of my own on the subject, which is this: I believe that the whole Gothic race, then comparatively small in numbers, on its entry into Europe found its way into Norway and Sweden, that there was then no difference between Teuton and Scandinavian, that as their numbers increased they passed southward by way of Denmark, into Germany, and then after this southward emigration, when the Baltic separated the race into a northern and southern division, a corresponding difference of language gradually grew up. I believe in effect that all Germans came into Germany from the north, that is from Norway and Sweden. They came comparatively late. So recently as B.C. 100, the limits of the German race were probably the Rhine on the west, the Elbe on the east, and on the south a line drawn from Mainz through Frankfort on the Maine to the Erzgebirge, the mountains which form the northern frontier of Bohemia. How they extended themselves from that narrow district is one of the most important facts which we have to note. Of course there would be one great difference between their position and that of their predecessors, the Kelts. When the Kelts came into Europe