As Dr. Latham has well said:—­

“It is certain that the language of England is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and that the remains of the original Keltic are unimportant.  It is by no means so certain that the blood of Englishmen is equally Germanic.  A vast amount of Kelticism, not found in our tongue, very probably exists in our pedigrees.  The ethnology of France is still more complicated.  Many writers make the Parisian a Roman on the strength of his language; whilst others make him a Kelt on the strength of certain moral characteristics, combined with the previous Kelticism of the original Gauls.  Spanish and Portuguese, as languages, are derivations from the Latin; Spain and Portugal, as countries, are Iberic, Latin, Gothic, and Arab, in different proportions.  Italian is modern Latin all the world over; yet surely there must be much Keltic blood in Lombardy, and much Etruscan intermixture in Tuscany.

“In the ninth century every man between the Elbe and the Niemen spoke some Slavonic dialect; they now nearly all speak German.  Surely the blood is less exclusively Gothic than the speech."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Latham, “Man and his Migrations,” p. 171.]

In other words, what philologer, if he had nothing but the vocabulary and grammar of the French and English languages to guide him, would dream of the real causes of the unlikeness of a Norman to a Provencal, of an Orcadian to a Cornishman?  How readily might he be led to suppose that the different climatal conditions to which these speakers of one tongue have so long been exposed, have caused their physical differences; and how little would he suspect that these are due (as we happen to know they are) to wide differences of blood.

Few take duly into account the evidence which exists as to the ease with which unlettered savages gain or lose a language.  Captain Erskine, in his interesting “Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific,” especially remarks upon the “avidity with which the inhabitants of the polyglot islands of Melanesia, from New Caledonia to the Solomon Islands, adopt the improvements of a more perfect language than their own, which different causes and accidental communication still continue to bring to them;” and he adds that “among the Melanesian islands scarcely one was found by us which did not possess, in some cases still imperfectly, the decimal system of numeration in addition to their own, in which they reckon only to five.”

Yet how much philological reasoning in favour of the affinity or diversity of two distinct peoples has been based on the mere comparison of numerals!