upon British Ethnology. 207
50 b. c.; while Britain, in Caesar's time, was an island into
which only a few Gaulish or other merchants had penetrated,
and which was not completely overrun by Agricola before
the year 84 a. d., or 134 years later. And Britain was
abandoned by the Romans at an earlier period in the fifth
century than that at which Roman authority came to an end
in Gaul, which being a much larger country than Roman
Britain, and in a more civilized condition, both absorbed its
invaders more easily and became much more thoroughly
Romanized than its northern neighbour. In addition, the
invaders of Gaul in the fifth century were Burgundians,
Franks, Visigoths, and Huns, people by no means so closely
allied to each other either in blood or language as the Angles,
Saxons, and Jutes. Thoroughly Romanized Gaul, therefore,
maintained its Latin tongue against its varied invaders with-
out difficulty ; while in Britain, where the city probably spoke
Latin, and the country people various British dialects, neither
tongue had prestige enough to enable it to hold its ground
against the speech of a mass of nearly homogeneous colonists.
Similar reasons seem to me to explain the disappearance of
Christianity in Eastern Britain, and its maintenance in Gaul;
it is probable that the British country people were in the
fifth century still mainly Pagan, while the cities of Britain
had become Christian.
It is thus obvious that the change of language and religion
gives no presumption that the change of race was of an
equally fundamental character, but leaves the question per-
fectly open. For, as the case of Cornwall teaches us, a
language may so increase a predominance originally slight
as to be gradually accepted by a race, once speaking another
tongue, without any corresponding change in blood accom-
panying its diffusion.
Aud as a language increases its ascendency and becomes
the tongue of a larger and larger number of people alien in
blood to its original speakers, they, on acquiring it, usually
identify themselves with those whose language they have
adopted, and often consider people much more really akin to
them as a different race. Thus it has been noticed that no