comparison with the noblest and most fruitful scions of the noblest and most fruitful stock. India may bring her Vedas and her Mahabharata, and Persia her Zend Avesta and Sháh Námeh, and Greece her Homeric poems, and Rome may more than supplement the whole mass of her narrow, haughty, and unoriginal literature by claiming the glory of the Divina Commedia, and the Lusiad, and the Poem of the Cid, but can any or all of them vaunt any superiority over the Teuton, who developed among his various descendants languages so lovely and noble, so strong and flexible, so subtle and wise, so intense and musical,-languages so rich with all treasures of Poetry, Science, Philosophy, Eloquence, and History, as the languages of the Eddas and the Niebelungen, and of our early ballads,—the languages of Kant and Goethe and Schiller, of Shakspeare, of Milton, and of Wordsworth, the languages carried by commercial enterprise from Zembla to Tierra del Fuego, --the languages which the thought of Germany, and the majesty of England, and the ebullient energy of America have elevated into the ruling languages of the political and intellectual world?

v. The Sclavonic* family, or, as some people prefer to call it, the Windic, may be very briefly dismissed.

*The word Slav is of uncertain derivation.

Professor Senkovski

derives it from the root slov- chlov- 'man' (Russian, cheloväku; Polish, czlowiek=slovak). Others derive it from sru, slu, Greek κλvin the sense of KAUTÓS, 'famous.'

The members of it, when they have defæcated their political existence of the Asiatic dregs of despotism and serfdom, are probably destined to play a very mighty part in the history of humanity. But at present they have barely emerged from a longcontinued barbarism; they have developed no very important or original literature, nor can we even vouchsafe the name of history to the insignificant and bloodstained annals of their imperial autocrats.*

For our present purpose it will be sufficient merely to refer to the table for a sufficient indication of the Slavonic languages and dialects. All we need here mention is that the oldest monuments of the language are to be found in Old Bulgarian or Old Church Slavic of the eleventh century.†

vi. The divisions of Lettic may also be seen sufficiently in the table and map. Its most im

* A considerable school of ethnologists and philologians would deny to the Russians as a nation the right to belong to the Slavonic stock. See especially a very elaborate work, Peuples Aryas et Tourans, par F. H. Duchiński (de Kiew). Paris, 1864. Madame de Staël called Moscow 'Rome tartare,' and M. Mérimée writes,' Par une brillante journée d'hiver Moscou c'est Constantinople en pelisse, c'est l'Orient gelé.'-Une année en Russie.

The reader may find ample information about the various Slavonic dialects in Max Müller's Survey of Languages, 67-84. The only ones which have any literary interest are the Polish and the Servian. (On the poems of a really remarkable Polish poet, Count Krasinski, Mr. Lytton (Owen Meredith) has founded his Orval and Christmas Eve: he has also written some beautiful versions of Servian songs.) Polabish is a dead dialect once spoken on the Elbe.

portant branch is the Lithuanian, which possesses indeed but little literature except certain dainos, or popular songs, but which, in consequence of its centuries of isolation, has preserved to an extraordinary extent all the living, and many, elsewhere extinct, elements of Aryan speech. It still retains, for instance, the dual number, and no less than seven out of the eight Sanskrit cases. The Old Prussian, which has been dead for two centuries, is only represented by the Catechism of Albert of Brandenburg. The Lettish, spoken in Courland and Livonia, is only a modernised form of Lithuanian.

III. The last to linger by the old cradle were the Aryans proper, who subsequently divided into Iranians and Hindoos.

vii. The name Iranian is derived from arya, and the oldest representatives of the language are the Old Persian and the Old Bactrian. The Old Persian is the language of many of the cuneiform inscriptions of the Achæmenid dynasty. The Old Bactrian or Zend is the language of the Avesta, the sacred writings of the Zoroastrian religion; Huzvâresch, or Pehlevi, is the language in which the commentaries and more recent versions of the Avesta are written. The great Epic poem of Firdousi, the Shah Nameh, or Book of Kings, which, besides the Avesta, is the only very memorable work produced in this family, is in Parsi or Pazend. The modern Persian is a degenerate scion of it, greatly

impoverished in grammatical forms, and degraded by a large admixture of Arabic and other words.*

viii. The Indian Family, so named from their long sojourn on the upper Indus,† is the family whose language was Sanskrit, whose religious poems were the Vedas, and from the bosom of which arose the venerable and wide-spread religion of Buddhism, preached by the Hindoo prince, Sakya-Mouni. Though India was their latest conquest, to which they made their way along the southern spurs of the Himalayas, it is on them that the light of historical knowledge first dawns, and it is from the discovery of the dead language which they once spoke that its latest science, the science of Comparative Philology, has sprung. Of Sanskrit we have already spoken. It has been gradually decomposed into the modern dialects of India and Ceylon, and it has a mutilated and degraded descendant in the language of the Gypsies, which in grammar is Aryan, although its vocabulary is a sort of common sewer into which the argots of nearly every nation of Asia and Europe have been discharged.

Having thus glanced at the eight varieties of

* More or less connected with Persian are the Pushtu of Afghanistan, the language of Bokhara, of the Kurds, the Armenian, and the Ossetian. For further information respecting these languages see Max Müller, Survey of Languages, pp. 32–36.

+ It is probable that the Aryan Hindoos did not begin to advance into the peninsula of India before B. c. 1000, and that they did not reach the Deccan (dakshin=South) before B. c. 450.

speech which compose the Aryan Unity, a careful study of the map and table which accompany this lecture will impress still more deeply on the mind the importance and interest of the facts which we have thus passed in review. Every day will add to their significance, because they reveal the changes which have taken place over vast areas of the world's surface, and the original affinities of the most active and civilised races of mankind. Even since this lecture was written, recent events, on which these considerations ought not to be without their bearing, have attracted the attention of the civilized world. We spoke but briefly of the great Slavonic race, because of its comparative unimportance when brought into contrast with the Hellenic, the Italic, or the Teutonic. Yet even since this lecture was written, the progress and development of that race have given rise to grave political questions, and have caused us a legitimate anxiety with respect to its future intentions. For in the case of this great Slavonic nation there has been, as it were, a regurgitation of the Aryan wave. Emigrating originally to the westward, they filled the immense regions which they had so long occupied, and are now flowing back again over the paths they traversed in their first departure. Persia has been long subjected to their influence: at this moment

all Turkestan is practically theirs.

Since Peter the

Great, in 1772, took Derbent, on the Caspian, from