ut off from
all connexion with the continent, and unrepresented by any continental
tongue.

The history, then, of the Gaels is that of an isolated branch of the
Keltic stock; and it is this isolation which creates the difficulties of
their ethnology. No historical records throw any light upon their
origin--a statement which the most sanguine investigator must admit. But
tradition, perhaps, is less uncommunicative. Many investigators believe
this. For my own part I should only be glad to be able to do so. As it
is, however, the arguments of the present chapter will proceed as if the
whole legendary history of Ireland and Scotland, so far as it relates to
the migrations by which the islands were originally peopled by the
Gaels, were a blank--the reasons for the scepticism being withheld for
the present. But only for the present. In the seventh chapter they will
be given as fully as space allows.

The present arguments rest wholly upon a fact of which the importance
has more than once been foreshadowed already, and which the reader
anticipates. Let us say, for the sake of illustration, that the British
and Gaelic differ from each other as the Latin and Greek. The parallel
is a rough one, but it will suffice as the basis of some criticism.

Languages thus related cannot be in the relation of mother and daughter,
_i.e._, the one cannot be derived from the other, as the English is from
the Anglo-Saxon, or the Italian from the Latin. The true connexion is
different. It is that of brother and sister, rather than of parent and
child. The actual source is some common mother-tongue; a mother-tongue
which may become extinct after the evolution of its progeny. Hence, in
the particular case before us, the Gaelic and British must have
developed themselves, each independently of the other, out of some
common form of speech. And the development must have taken place within
the British Islands; the doctrine being that out of a language which at
some remote period was neither British nor Gaelic, but which contained
the germs of both, the western form of speech took one form, the
southern another--the results being in the one case the British, in the
other the Gaelic, tongue.

But that common mother-tongue at the remote period in question, the
period of the earliest occupancy of Britain, must have been spoken on
both sides of the Channel--in Gaul as well as the British Islands. And
here (_i.e._, in Gaul) it may have done one of two thi