ther meet with
fragments of a supplanted nation, such as the Finns and Lapps in the
Celto-Germanic domain and the black tribes in the Indian mountains;
nor have any remains of an extinct primitive people been hitherto
pointed out there, such as appear to be revealed in the peculiarly-formed
skeletons, the places of assembling, and the burial mounds of what
is called the stone-period of Germanic antiquity. Nothing has
hitherto been brought to light to warrant the supposition that
mankind existed in Italy at a period anterior to the knowledge of
agriculture and of the smelting of the metals; and if the human
race ever within the bounds of Italy really occupied the level of
that primitive stage of culture which we are accustomed to call
the savage state, every trace of such a fact has disappeared.

Individual tribes, or in other words, races or stocks, are the
constituent elements of the earliest history. Among the stocks which
in later times we meet with in Italy, the immigration of some, of
the Hellenes for instance, and the denationalization of others,
such as the Bruttians and the inhabitants of the Sabine territory,
are historically attested. Setting aside both these classes, there
remain a number of stocks whose wanderings can no longer be traced
by means of historical testimony, but only by a priori inference,
and whose nationality cannot be shown to have undergone any radical
change from external causes. To establish the national individuality
of these is the first aim of our inquiry. In such an inquiry,
had we nothing to fall back upon but the chaotic mass of names of
tribes and the confusion of what professes to be historical tradition,
the task might well be abandoned as hopeless. The conventionally
received tradition, which assumes the name of history, is composed
of a few serviceable notices by civilized travellers, and a mass
of mostly worthless legends, which have usually been combined with
little discrimination of the true character either of legend or
of history. But there is another source of tradition to which we
may resort, and which yields information fragmentary but authentic;
we mean the indigenous languages of the stocks settled in Italy from
time immemorial. These languages, which have grown with the growth
of the peoples themselves, have had the stamp of their process
of growth impressed upon them too deeply to be wholly effaced
by subsequent civilization. One only of the Italian languag