is tempted to navigation, and so the
Greeks learned to be a race of sailors. What the shore line of Europe was
to that of the other continents, that the shore line of Greece was to the
rest of Europe. Only long after, in the Baltic, the Northern
Mediterranean, did a similar land-locked sea create a similar love of
navigation among the Scandinavians.[204]

Another feature in the physical geography of Greece must be noticed as
having an effect on the psychical condition of its inhabitants. Mountains
intersected every part, dividing its tribes from each other. In numerous
valleys, separated by these mountain walls, each clan, left to itself,
formed a special character of its own. The great chain of Pindus with its
many branches, the lofty ridges of the Peloponnesus, allowed the people of
Thessaly, Boeotia, Attica, Phocis, Locris, Argolis, Arcadia, Laconia, to
attain those individual traits which distinguish them during all the
course of Greek history.

Such physical conditions as we have described are eminently favorable to
a free and full development of national character. But this word
"development," so familiar to modern thought, implies not only outward
circumstances to educate, but a special germ to be educated. So long as
the human being is regarded as a lump of dough, to be moulded into any
shape by external influences, no such term as "development" was needed.
But philosophical historians now admit national character to be the result
of two factors,--the original ethnic germ in the race, and the terrestrial
influences which unfold it.[205] A question, therefore, of grave moment
concerns the origin of the Hellenic people. Whence are they derived? what
are their affinities? and from what region did they come?

The science of Comparative Philology, one of the great triumphs of modern
scholarship, has enabled us now, for the first time, to answer this
question. What no Greek knew, what neither Herodotus, Plato, nor Aristotle
could tell us, we are now able to state with certainty. The Greek
language, both in its grammar and its vocabulary, belongs to the family of
Indo-European languages, of which the Sanskrit is the elder sister. Out of
eleven thousand six hundred and thirty-three Greek words, some two
thousand are found to be Sanskrit, and three thousand more to belong to
other branches of the Indo-European tongues. As the words common to the
Greek and the Sanskrit must have been in use by both races before their
se