when used as it is the usual practice to use them. That
strange sentences may be made by picking out strange provincialisms,
and stringing them together in a manner that never occurs in common
parlance, is likely enough; but that any two men speaking English shall
be in the same position to each other as an Englishman is to a Dutchman
or Dane, so that one shall not know what the other says, is what I am
wholly unprepared to believe, both from what I have observed in the
practice of provincial speech, and what I have read in the way of
provincial glossaries.

The populations, however, just enumerated, represent but a fraction of
our ethnological varieties. They only give us those of the nineteenth
century. Other sections have become extinct, or, if not, have lost their
distinctive characteristics, which is much the same as dying out
altogether. The ethnology of these populations is a matter of history.
Beginning with those that have most recently been assimilated to the
great body of Englishmen, we have--

1. The Cornishmen of Cornwall.--They are Britons in blood, and until the
seventeenth century, were Britons in language also. When the Cornish
language ceased to be spoken it was still intelligible to a Welshman;
yet in the reign of Henry II., although intelligible, it was still
different. Giraldus Cambrensis especially states that the "Cornubians
and Armoricans used a language almost identical; a language which the
Welsh, from origin and intercourse, understood in _many_ things, and
_almost_ in all."

2. The Cumbrians, of Cumberland, retained the British language till
after the Conquest. This was, probably, spoken as far north as the
Clyde. Earlier, however, than either of these were--

3. The Picts.--The Cumbrian and Cornish Britons were simply members of
the same division with the Welshmen, Welshmen, so to say, when the Welsh
area extended south of the Bristol Channel and north of the Mersey. The
Picts were, probably, in a different category. They may indeed have been
Gaels. They have formed a separate substantive division of Kelts. They
may have been no Kelts at all, but Germans or Scandinavians.

But populations neither Keltic nor Teutonic have, at different times,
settled in England; populations which (like several branches of the
Keltic stock) have either lost their distinctive characteristics, or
become mixed in blood, but which (unlike such Kelts) were not indigenous
to any of the islands. Like the Germans