appear very much destroyed,
whereas in the southern Italian dialects they have suffered little;
and connected with this is the fact, that in composition the Roman
weakens the radical vowel otherwise so strictly preserved,--a
modification which does not take place in the kindred group of
languages. The genitive of words in -a is in this group as among
the Greeks -as, among the Romans in the matured language -ae;
that of words in -us is in the Samnite -eis, in the Umbrian -es,
among the Romans -ei; the locative disappeared more and more from
the language of the latter, while it continued in full use in the
other Italian dialects; the dative plural in -bus is extant only
in Latin. The Umbro-Samnite infinitive in -um is foreign to the
Romans; while the Osco-Umbrian future formed from the root -es after
the Greek fashion (-her-est- like --leg-so--) has almost, perhaps
altogether, disappeared in Latin, and its place is supplied by
the optative of the simple verb or by analogous formations from
-fuo-(-amabo-). In many of these instances, however--in the forms
of the cases, for example--the differences only exist in the two
languages when fully formed, while at the outset they coincide. It
thus appears that, while the Italian language holds an independent
position by the side of the Greek, the Latin dialect within it
bears a relation to the Umbro-Samnite somewhat similar to that of
the Ionic to the Doric; and the differences of the Oscan and Umbrian
and kindred dialects may be compared with the differences between
the Dorism of Sicily and the Dorism of Sparta.

Each of these linguistic phenomena is the result and the attestation
of an historical event. With perfect certainty they guide us to
the conclusion, that from the common cradle of peoples and languages
there issued a stock which embraced in common the ancestors of the
Greeks and the Italians; that from this, at a subsequent period,
the Italians branched off; and that these again divided into the
western and eastern stocks, while at a still later date the eastern
became subdivided into Umbrians and Oscans.

When and where these separations took place, language of course
cannot tell; and scarce may adventurous thought attempt to grope
its conjectural way along the course of those revolutions, the
earliest of which undoubtedly took place long before that migration
which brought the ancestors of the Italians across the Apennines.
On the other hand the comparison of