behind them. The Latin race first appears as an insignificant handful in central Italy, crowded by other communities, in part of kindred blood; but no legend told us respecting its entrance into the Italian peninsula is of the very smallest historical value. Roman historians first bring to our knowledge the Celts and Germans. The former are already beginning to shrink and waste away within their ancient limits before the aggressions of the surrounding races: Celtic tales of the migrations westward which brought them into their European seats are but lying legends, mere echoes of their later knowledge of the countries and nations to the eastward. Germany is, from the first, the home of the Germans: they are a seething mass; south-eastward as well as southwestward rove their restless hordes, disturbing for centuries the peace of the civilized world; they leave their traces in every country of middle Europe, from the Volga to the Pillars of Hercules; but whence and when they came into Germany, we ask in vain. Last to appear upon the historic stage are the Slavonians, in nearly their present abodes: a less enterprising, but a stubborn and persistent race, whose lately acquired civilization has only within a short time begun to be aggressive. Of its own origin, it has nothing at all to say.
But if history and tradition thus refuse to aid us in searching for the Indo-European home, neither do the indications of language point us with anything like definiteness or certainty to its locality. The tongues of the easternmost branches, the Persian and Indian, do, indeed, exhibit the least departure from that form of speech which a general comparison of all the dialects shows to have been the primitive one; but this is very far from proving the peoples who speak them to have remained nearest to their primitive seats. Migration does not necessarily lead to rapidity of linguistic changes, nor does permanence of location always imply persistency of linguistic type. Thus—to refer only to two or three striking facts among the languages of this family—the Greek has preserved much more than the Armenian of that material and structure which were of earliest Indo-European development, notwithstanding the more oriental position of
