ments of modern research is the discovery of
a key by which we may determine the kinship of nations. What we used
to conjecture, we now know. An identity in the structural form of
language establishes with scientific certitude that however diverse
their character and civilizations, Russian, German, Englishman,
Frenchman, Spaniard, are all but branches from the same parent stem,
are all alike children of the Asiatic Aryan.

So skilful are modern methods of questioning the past, and so
determined the effort to find out its secrets, we may yet know the
origin and history of this wonderful Asiatic people, and when and why
they left their native continent and colonized upon the northern shores
of the Mediterranean. Certain it is, however, that, more centuries
before the Christian era than there have been since, they had peopled
Western Europe.

This branch of the Aryan family is known as the Keltic, and was older
brother to the Teuton and Slav, which at a much later period followed
them from the ancestral home, and appropriated the middle and eastern
portions of the European Continent.

The name of Gaul was given to the territory lying between the Ocean and
the Mediterranean, and the Pyrenees and the Alps. And at a later
period a portion of Northern Gaul, and the islands lying north of it,
received from an invading chieftain and his tribe the name _Brit_ or
_Britain_ (or Pryd or Prydain).

If the mind could be carried back on the track of time, and we could
see what we now call France as it existed twenty centuries before the
Christian era, we should behold the same natural features: the same
mountains rearing their heads; the same rivers flowing to the sea; the
same plains stretching out in the sunlight. But instead of vines and
flowers and cultivated fields we should behold great herds of wild ox
and elk, and of swine as fierce as wolves, ranging in a climate as cold
as Norway; and vast, inaccessible forests, the home of beasts of prey,
which contended with man for food and shelter.

Let us read Guizot's description of life in Gaul five centuries before
Christ:

"Here lived six or seven millions of men a bestial life, in dwellings
dark and low, built of wood and clay and covered with branches or
straw, open to daylight by the door alone and confusedly heaped
together behind a rampart of timber, earth, and stone, which enclosed
and protected what they were pleased to call--a _town_."

Such was the Paris and su