Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ... tionally, and for the sake of being intelligible. Each term embodies a theory which is hotly debated, but each is fixed in the nomenclature of ethnology, and so will be readily understood. The word 'Celtic' is here used to cover two groups of peoples: first, the Gaels; secondly, the Brythons who came after the Gaels. These peoples had racial and linguistic affinities. As a fact, the Goidels, who entered Britain somewhere between the eighth and the tenth century B.C., and the Brythons, who came from Belgica about the third century B.C., spoke dialects differing from each other as much as Latin differed from Greek or English from German.15 With respect to the term 'Aryan' and its correlative 'non-Aryan, ' the excuse for perpetuation is necessity--tyrant custom has already settled the matter. The late Professor Max Muller, reasoning on the basis of comparative philology, traced back the Celts, Teutons, Greeks, Romans, and other races to a primitive undivided stock which had its origin in Central Asia. He lived long enough to see his old theory discarded, but it must be confessed that the ethnologist and the philologist have not even yet settled their quarrel, nor determined the locality of the Aryan cradle. Meanwhile, the word 'Aryan ' must stand for race-aggregates having obvious relationships in speech and blood. Let it be said, however, that it is scarcely to language that one looks for an answer to ethnological questions. Languages may be copied through friendly intercourse, or the compulsion of commerce; they may be enforced by conquest, or they may die out, no one quite knows why, by the fusion of races. Did we inspect speech only we might call the English a Teutonic, and the French a Latin people, yet how short of the truth would be..
