skulls. Lastly, the date thus assigned to the Aryan arrival in Europe will seem far too remote, particularly if it be considered that long before the first waves of the Aryan emigrants touched the shores of Europe, Turanian tribes, Finns, Lapps, and Basks, must have roved through the forests of our continent. My answer is, that I feel the same difficulty myself, but that I have always considered a full statement of a difficulty a necessary step towards its solution. I shall be as much pleased to see my hypothesis refuted as to see it confirmed. All that I request for it is an impartial examination.52

The same opinion has lately found a powerful supporter in Professor Huxley. I refer particularly to his paper On the Methods and Results of Ethnology,' published in the Fortnightly Review, No. 3, June 15, 1865; and his lecture on the Forefathers of the English People,' published in Nature, March 17, 1870.

'If we confine our attention,' he says, 'to the British Islands, we have absolutely no means of ascribing any special physical characters to the Celtic-speaking people. A British or Irish "Celt" might be tall or short, dark or fair, round-headed or long-headed; and the remark of Professor Max Müller, that it is as rational to speak of a dolichocephalic language as of a Celtic skull, is, for the Celts of Britain, perfectly justified.'

52 Some notes on the causes of the change of the vegetation in ancient Denmark, in G. P. Marsh, Man and Nature, p. 3, seq.

LECTURE VI.

ON THE PRINCIPLES OF ETYMOLOGY.

VOLTAIRE defined etymology as a science in which vowels signify nothing at all, and consonants very little. L'étymologie,' he said, ‘est une science où les voyelles ne font rien, et les consonnes fort peu de chose.' Nor was this sarcasm quite undeserved by those who wrote on etymology in Voltaire's time, and we need not wonder that a man so reluctant to believe in any miracles should have declined to believe in the miracles of etymology. Of course, not even Voltaire was so great a sceptic as to maintain that the words of our modern languages have no etymology, i. e. no origin, at all. Words do not spring into life by an act of spontaneous generation, and the words of modern languages in particular are in many cases so much like the words of ancient languages that no doubt is possible as to their real origin and derivation. Wherever there was a certain similarity in sound and meaning between French words and words belonging to Latin, German, Hebrew, or any other tongue, even Voltaire would have acquiesced. No one, for instance, could ever have doubted that the French word for God, Dieu, was the same as the Latin Deus; that the French

homme, and even on, was the Latin homo; the French femme, the Latin femina. In these instances there had been no change of meaning, and the change of form, though the process by which it took place remained unexplained, was not such as to startle even the most sensitive conscience. There was indeed one department of etymology which had been cultivated with great success in Voltaire's time, and even long before him, namely, the history of the Neo-Latin or Romance dialects. We find in the dictionary of Du Cange a most valuable collection of extracts from medieval Latin writers, which enables us to trace, step by step, the gradual changes of form and meaning from ancient to modern Latin; and we have in the much ridiculed dictionary of Menage many an ingenious contribution towards tracing those medieval Latin words in the earliest documents of French literature, from the times of the Crusades to the Siècle of Louis XIV. Thus a mere reference to Montaigne, who wrote in the sixteenth century, is sufficient to prove that the modern French gêner was originally gehenner. Montaigne writes: 'Je me suis contraint et gehenné,' meaning, 'I have forced and tortured myself.' This verb gehenner is easily traced back to the Latin gehenna,' used in the Greek of the New Testament and in the ecclesiastical writings of the middle ages not only in the sense of hell, but in the more general sense of suffering and pain. It is well known that Gehenna was originally the name of the valley of Hinnom, near Jerusalem (Dana), the Tophet, where the Jews burnt their sons and their daughters in the fire, and of which Jere

Molière says, 'Je sens de son courroux des gênes trop cruelles.'

2

miah prophesied that it should be called the valley of slaughter: for 'They shall bury in Tophet till there be no place.' How few persons think now of the sacrifices offered to Moloch in the valley of Hinnom when they ask their friends to make themselves comfortable, and say, 'Ne vous génez pas.'

It was well known not only to Voltaire, but even to Henri Estienne, who wrote in the sixteenth century, that it is in Latin we may expect to find the original form and meaning of most of the words which fill the dictionaries of the French, Italian, and Spanish languages. But these early etymologists never knew of any test by which a true derivation might be distinguished from a false one, except

2 Jeremiah vii. 31, 32.

Henri Estienne, Traicte de la Conformité du Langage François ave le Grec, 1566. What Estienne means by the conformité of French and Greek refers chiefly to syntactical peculiarities, common to both guages. En une epistre Latine que je mi l'an passé audevant de quelqu miens dialogues Grecs, ce propos m'eschappa, Quia multo majcen Gallica lingua cum Græcâ habet affinitatem quam Latina; et quidam tantum (absit invidia dicto) ut Gallos eo ipso quod nati sint Gal maximum ad linguæ Græcæ cognitionem προτέρημα set πλεονέκτημα afferre putem.' Estienne's etymologies are mostly sensible and scler, those which are of a more doubtful character are marked as such ty himself. It is not right to class sc great a scholar as H. Estierre together with Perion, and to charge him with having ignored the La origin of French. (See August Fuchs, Die Romanischen Sprachen, 184*, p. 9.) What Estienne thought of Perion may be seen from the following extract (Traicte de la Conformité, p. 139): Il trouvera assez ló nem1be de telles en un livre de nostre maistre Perion: je ne di pas seulemet de phantastiques, mais de sottes et ineptes, et si lourdes et asnieres que r'estoyent les autres temoignages que ce poure moine nous a laissez de sa lourderie et asnerie, on pourroit penser son œuvre estre suppose. Estienne is wrongly charged with having derived admiral, French amri, from aλuvpós. He says it is Arabic, and so it is. It is the Arab E wr, prince, leader, possibly with the Arabic article. French amiral; Spen. almirante; It. almiraglio, as if from admirabilis. Hammer's derivation from amir al bahr, commander of the sea, is untenable.

similarity of sound and meaning; and how far this similarity might be extended may be seen in such works as Perion's Dialogi de Lingua Gallica Origine (1557), or Guichard's Harmonie Étymologique des Langues Hebraique, Chaldaique, Syriaque, Greque, Latine, Italienne, Espagnole, Allemande, Flamende, Angloise (Paris, 1606). Perion derives brebis, sheep (the Italian berbice) from próbaton, not from the Latin vervex, like berger from berbicarius. Envoyer he derives from the Greek pémpein, not from the Latin inviare. Heureux he derives from the Greek oŭrios.

Now, if we take the last instance, it is impossible to deny that there is a certain similarity of form and meaning between the Greek and French; and as there can be no doubt that certain French words, such as parler, prêtre, aumône, were derived from Greek, it would have been very difficult to convince M. Perion that his derivation of heureux was not quite as good as any other. There is another etymology of the same word, according to which it is derived from the Latin hora. Bonheur is supposed to be bona hora; malheur, mala hora; and therefore heureux is referred to a supposed Latin form, horosus, in the sense of fortunatus. This etymology, however, is no better than that of Perion. It is a guess, and no more, and it falls to the ground as soon as any of the more rigid tests of etymological science are applied to it. In this instance the test is very simple. There is, first of all, the gender of malheur and bonheur, masculine instead of feminine. Secondly, we find

4 Appui de ma vieillesse, et comble de mon heur, Touche ces cheveux blancs à qui tu rends l'honneur.

Cid.