206 Notes on the Evidence bearing
simplicity, and its settlement of the question without leaving
any need for further inquiry, have made it highly popular.
It has not received the same favour from anthropologists, to
whom language offers but one test of race, and that of by no
means the most fundamental nature. However, fifteen years
ago the philologists were generally considered almost the sole
authorities on this question. Thus, when Professor Huxley,
in January 1870, delivered a lecture on "The Forefathers
and Forerunners of the English People," in which he re-
marked that "physical, mental, and moral peculiarities go
with blood and not with language;" and, in combating the
common anti-Celtic cant, said that a native of Tipperary was
"just as much or as little an Anglo-Saxon as a native of
Devonshire," an opponent in the 'Saturday Review' con-
sidered him to have taken up a subject not properly within
his province ! But in 1874 an eminent philologist, the Rev.
A. H. Sayce, remarked in a discussion at the Anthropo-
logical Institute, that not only is "the philologist who makes
language the test of race a bold man, but I would go further
and say that language cannot be the test of race at all, but
only of social contact." And in a paper illustrating this
remark which appears in the same volume of the Journ.
Anthrop. Inst. (1874) he says:—"As regards race, language
will tell us nothing. It does not even raise a presumption
that the speakers of the same language are all of the same
origin. . . . Language shows that they have all come under
the same social influences." It is thus obvious that language
can only give a presumption as to race where evidence from
the personal characteristics, &c, of a people is not in opposi-
tion to it. In the case of this country, however, anthropo-
logists are generally of opinion that its inhabitants are much
less Teutonic than their language.
Anglo-Saxon Britain being nearly identical in area with
Roman Britain, it is certainly a note-worthy matter that
while in Gaul the Roman language and religion lived on,
they disappeared before the Teutonic invaders of Britain.
But there was a considerable Greek and Roman intercourse
with Gaul before it was conquered by Julius Caesar, about