confirmed, but which is to be held until disproved; for the differences of climate manifestly require an adaptation in every human race; and it is beyond dispute that the change of races, so as to make them thoroughly fitted to a foreign climate, is an extremely slow process. Let us allow that a negro race might at length be possessed of full vigour in Canada, and an English race in India; still (until we have evidence to that effect) we do not easily believe that one climate was (so to say) made a favourite for human origination; that the constitution of the race was primitively adapted in perfection to that one group of physical circumstances, and was then left by slow and painful degrees to acquire aptitude for other circumstances. This may have been the process. There may have been excellent reasons for it. But prior to any specific information on the point, all will assume the opposite presumption, that many human races had independent origin, cach being from the beginning fitted to its own climate and conditions. Such was the meaning attached by the ancients to the word 'indigenous,' which was popularly paraphrased by saying that each race sprang from its own soil.

But there is yet another question, far more important than this, which is liable to be obscured in the controversy. On both sides it is too apt to be asserted or implied that to hold a multiplicity of human origins is to deny the unity of the human species; and we judge this confusion to be the worst by far of all which the heat of the contest has engendered. No one would for a moment allow that the naturalist held horses to consist of an indefinite number of species because he believed their origin to have been from an indefinite number of individuals, and not from a single pair. Every body's meaning and test of unity of species in the horse is found in present fact-in the likenesses and unlikenesses of nature now existing; but whether the origin was from two or from two thousand individuals is not to the purpose. So also, whether the original individuals came to life all in Africa, or some in Africa and some in Tartary, has nothing to do with the question whether the Tartar horse and the African horse are of the same species: that, again, must be judged by other considerations, especially from the sameness or diversity of powers and instincts, and from the capacity of fusing themselves into a mixed race which retains all the powers of the progenitors. The same considerations must be applied to human races. One theorist believes that Englishmen, Papuans, Hottentots, Aztecs, are of four different origins; another that they are all from one forefather: but the disputants need not be the less agreed that all four races are strictly of the same species-man. The great variety of faculties, passions, affections, and tendencies, as well as of instincts, bodily powers, and peculiarities, found in

human races, give far greater severity to the test of a common manhood, and proportionate facility of rejecting intrusive pretenders. Science is not needed. Common sense as infallibly teaches man to distinguish man, as dog to recognise dog; and it is deplorable that the prominent and notorious certainty of the unity of the human species should ever have been supposed at stake in a question on which probable opinions may be held, but which can never become a scientific certainty of the same order, -the question, under what circumstances human races had their origin.

Thus, we apprehend, on the unity of the human species all are agreed; the question is settled by common sense, and is one of the substantial facts on which science has to build, but which no science can root up. The derivation of that one species from one pair of progenitors is a doctrine for which no scientific reasons are ever adduced by those who think they are maintaining it. Finally, the question whether that one species has always existed in many races, or once existed as only one race-this is the real matter about which, and about which alone, there is scientific dispute.

And here the facts of history, recent as is our knowledge, are such as to show the dangers of that most necessary process, à priori argument. Who that looks upon Germany, England, even Northern Italy, could, without history, have conjectured that three to four thousand years ago, when Egypt and China, India and Babylon, abounded with dense population and elaborate civilisation, our lands were covered with forest or morass; and if not absolutely without human population, yet were only wandered over by almost savage men? So much, indeed, Tacitus and Livy and Herodotus knew; but they did not know-what since the English conquest of India has been brought to light by the labours of grammarians, beginning from Sir William Jones-that the language spoken by the British, the German, the Cisalpine, the Scythian savages, proves them to be emigrants from the same centre of population as the people of Persia and of Bengal. The proof is of the highest degree of cogency, and admits of no evasion; nor are there two opinions about it among learned men, whatever in other respects their doctrines or tendencies. Thus, à priori, we should have expected Britain, Germany, Gaul, Italy, Greece, to have been peopled as early as Babylonia, Egypt, India, and China: à posteriori, we find this to be contrary to the fact; and that it is a doctrine not merely of religion, but also of history and of science, that Europe has been entirely, or almost* entirely, peopled from the East and South

We say almost, because of the yet uncertain relations of the Iberian or Basque population.

east. Again, the physical constitution of a Brahmin is so dif ferent from that of an Englishman, that, but for the phenomena of language, it is scarcely probable that the advocates of many original human races would have admitted it as an open question whether both were of one descent. We are aware that the gap between the lower races of India and the Brahmin is considerable; and so is that between the Pariah and the Negro. There may be adequate scientific reasons for rather believing in several than in a single origin; but when, resting on physical diversities, men talk dogmatically on the "absolute impossibility" of Negrillos, even in the ages of time given us by geology, becoming modified into Egyptians, or Pariahs into Brahmins,-whatever the eminence of such men, they do but make us regret that science is not always modest.

The discovery of the intimate early relation between Gauls, Britons, Germans, Slavonians, Latins, Greeks, and Indo-Persians, ought materially to affect many of our opinions and reasonings concerning the tribes and nations mentioned in Greek and Roman authors. It being admitted that there once was a time when the Gaulish, the German, the Lithuanian tribes differed very little in language, it is irrational to assume that two or three thousand years ago there were the same chasms between European languages as now. The phenomena of great continents thinly overspread with an unstable and barbarous population are known to us in modern times; and we can pronounce that when it has proceeded from one source, there will be a vast development of imperfect languages, connected by partial agreements, so as (if we could see and know the whole) in all probability to have nowhere any abrupt and violent diversity. The effect of great kingdoms, empires, and civilisation, is to perfect the imperial language, and extinguish by the dozen those dialects or languages which exist by its side: whence, as time goes on, gaps are produced in the series. Side by side with this, under the operation of political causes, national characters are brought out into sharper contrast; and by the long operation of habits, food, and climate, even physical peculiarities arise which were not always in the race.

Grimm, the very first authority concerning the old German languages, in the reasonings of the work before us, distinctly treats the ancient Danes as one people with the Germans;-as undoubtedly Pliny and Tacitus supposed them. We accept this as an assurance that Grimm believes the vast chasm now separating the Danish and German tongues to have been generated by the history of 1800 years. At this moment the process is rapidly going on, which, by exterminating the various shades of dialect that are named Platt Deutsch, will leave a chasm be

It is inevitable to infer that

tween the Dutch and the German. in the time of Cæsar, when neither did the Britons talk exactly the modern Welsh, nor the people of Celtica exactly the modern Breton; when neither the Frisian, nor the Dutch, nor German, nor Danish, were what they now are;-it is within possibility that many tongues existed intermediate to those of the great families now known-tongues which have since perished, exaggerating the gap between nations. At any rate, we ought not to wonder at the hesitation and contradictions of ancient writers, when they endeavour to mark sharply the limits of languages. Rather, without involving the case of mixed nations, we ought to expect that even to the best-informed it would be impossible to refer their languages to so few heads as those which the moderns recognise. Nevertheless, the tendency of modern writers who mean to be particularly scientific is generally towards hardening and intensifying the separation of races. They discuss whether Belgians or Ligurians were of Celtic or of German stock in a tone which implies that there cannot have been any thing between, and as though Gauls and Germans were original, permanent, eternal existences. It must be admitted that ethnologists have yet much to do in clearing their first principles and justifying their nomenclature.

The two works at the head of this article are in such startling contrast concerning the extent of the ancient German tribes as to be almost ludicrous. The real contrast is, indeed, not so great as the apparent, since it is pretty clear that Grimm, with us, believes that in those days the languages were less sharply divided, and gives a very undesirable vagueness to his use of the word "German." Still, with all such allowance, we must repeat, the contrast is startling. In the opinion of Latham, all the Slavonian population of modern Poland and Germany were already in their present sites in the days of Tiberius Cæsar; and, in fact, were spread over large tracts, which have since been more or less invaded by an eastward movement of the Germans. In his map, the entire basin from which the Elbe and the Saale are fed is Slavonian, and Germany is shut up to the west of this region. Between Bohemia and the Danube he does give to the Germans a narrow strip of land, as also the banks of the March, the Waag, and the Gran; but if they had no footing in Mecklenburg, Magdeburg, Saxony, Silesia, nor any where beyond the Elbe except at its very mouth, one wonders whence came the powerful Germans who overthrew the Roman empire, especially when we know how full of forest and swamp, and how thin of human population, was all western Germany. We should add, every thing south of the Mayn and of the Danube was occupied by a population foreign to Germany (Helvetian, Gaulish, Rhætian),

and was under Roman rule; so that at this corner also Baden, Wurtemburg, two-thirds of Bavaria, Styria, and the greater part of Austria, are agreed to have not been German at that time. Dr. Latham's Germany, in recent days, had the following population:

If, therefore, we allow one to two millions for the same districts in the days of Tacitus, we are probably over the mark; since cattle were the principal sustenance of the Germans, agriculture was capricious and changing, town populations did not exist, and vast districts were kept desert by the policy of the strong tribes and the fears of the weaker. Indeed, it may reasonably be doubted whether Dr. Latham's Germany then contained one million inhabitants.

Jacob Grimm, on the other hand, not only includes in Germany all Bohemia, Thuringia, Saxony, Silesia, Mecklenburg, and Pomerania, but Poland and eastern Prussia, Gallicia, and probably Lodomiria, Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia. Moreover, with Tacitus, he sees over Denmark and Scandinavia a properly German people: nor only so, but in the far east he claims the Tyrigetæ on the Dniester, the Massagetæ on the Don (or on the Sir-deria !), as well as the Sacæ on the frontier of Bactria, as indirectly German; and indicates his strong suspicion that the Tectosage of Gaul and of Asia Minor were more German than Gaulish. In such views there does appear a strange greediness to exalt the outspread of the German people, -a people who had no common name or national consciousness of unity. The nucleus, however, of Grimm's novelties is found in his advocating as truth the doctrine of all the later Romans, and of the Gothic historians Cassiodorus and Jornandes, that the Goths and the Getæ are the same people and the same name. It will therefore conduce to clearness, if we first expound briefly the facts which here meet us.

Herodotus tells us of a people called Getæ, who lived in the north of "Thrace," that is, between the Balkan and the Danube; whom he calls the justest and the bravest of the Thracians, and whom he represents to be vehement believers in the immortality