he Aquitanians and Spaniards, and may possibly have
extended much further to the East. Whether it has any connection with
the Ligurian and Oscan dialects are questions upon which, of course,
I do not presume to offer any opinion. But it is important to remark
that it is a language the area of which has gradually diminished
without any corresponding extirpation of the people who primitively
spoke it; so that the people of Spain and of Aquitaine at the present
day must be largely "Euskarian" by descent in just the same sense as
the Cornish men are "Celtic" by descent.

Such seem to me to be the main facts respecting the ethnology of the
British islands and of Western Europe, which may be said to be fairly
established. The hypothesis by which I think (with De Belloguet and
Thurnam) the facts may best be explained is this: In very remote times
Western Europe and the British islands were inhabited by the dark
stock, or the Melanochroi, alone, and these Melanochroi spoke dialects
allied to the Euskarian. The Xanthochroi, spreading over the great
Eurasiatic plains westward, and speaking Aryan dialects, gradually
invaded the territories of the Melanochroi. The Xanthochroi, who
thus came into contact with the Western Melanochroi, spoke a Celtic
language; and that Celtic language, whether Cymric or Gaelic, spread
over the Melanochroi far beyond the limits of intermixture of blood,
supplanting Euskarian, just as English and French, have supplanted
Celtic. Even as early as Caesar's time, I suppose that the Euskarian
was everywhere, except in Spain and in Aquitaine, replaced by Celtic,
and thus the Celtic speakers were no longer of one ethnological stock,
but of two. Both in Western Europe and in England a third wave of
language--in the one case Latin, in the other Teutonic--has spread
over the same area. In Western Europe, it has left a fragment of the
primary Euskarian in one corner of the country, and a fragment of the
secondary Celtic in another. In the British islands, only outlying
pools of the secondary linguistic wave remain in Wales, the Highlands,
Ireland, and the Isle of Man. If this hypothesis is a sound one, it
follows that the name of Celtic is not properly applicable to the
Melanochroic or dark stock of Europe. They are merely, so to speak,
secondary Celts. The primary and aboriginal Celtic-speaking people are
Xanthochroi--the typical Gauls of the ancient writers, and the close
allies by blood, customs, and language,