II. The Belgae and the Celtae, with the offshoots of the latter in Asia Minor, spoke dialects of the Cymric division of Celtic.

The evidence of this proposition lies in the statement of St. Jerome before cited; in the similarity of the names of places in Belgic Gaul and in Britain; and in the direct comparison of sundry ancient Gaulish and Belgic words which have been preserved, with the existing Cymric dialects, for which I must refer to the learned work of Brandes.

Formerly, as at the present day, the Cymric dialects of Celtic were spoken by both the fair and the dark stocks.

III. There is no record of Gaelic being spoken anywhere save in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man.

This appears to be the final result of the long discussions which have taken place on this much-debated question.  As is the case with the Cymric dialects, Gaelic is now spoken by both dark and fair stocks.

IV. When the Teutonic languages first became known, they were spoken only Xanthochroi, that is to say, by the Germans, the Scandinavians, and Goths.  And they were imported by Xanthochroi into Gaul and into Britain.

In Gaul the imported Teutonic dialect has been completely overpowered by the more or less modified Latin, which it found already in possession; and what Teutonic blood there may be in modern Frenchmen is not adequately represented in their language.  In Britain, on the contrary, the Teutonic dialects have overpowered the pre-existing forms of speech, and the people are vastly less “Teutonic” than their language.  Whatever may have been the extent to which the Celtic-speaking population of the eastern half of Britain was trodden out and supplanted by the Teutonic-speaking Saxons and Danes, it is quite certain that no considerable displacement of the Celtic-speaking people occurred in Cornwall, Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland; and that nothing approaching to the extinction of that people took place in Devonshire, Somerset, or the western moiety of Britain generally.  Nevertheless, the fundamentally Teutonic English language is now spoken throughout Britain, except by an insignificant fraction of the population in Wales and the Western Highlands.  But it is obvious that this fact affords not the slightest justification for the common practice of speaking of the present inhabitants of Britain as an “Anglo-Saxon” people.  It is, in fact, just as absurd as the habit of talking of the French people as a “Latin” race, because they speak a language which is, in the main, derived from Latin.  And the absurdity becomes the more patent when those who have no hesitation in calling a Devonshire man, or a Cornish man, an “Anglo-Saxon,” would think it ridiculous to call a Tipperary man by the same title, though he and his forefathers may have spoken English for as long a time as the Cornish man.