from Spain to Scotland. Mingled in many places with the still earlier
non-Aryan aborigines–perhaps Iberians and Euskarians, a short and
swarthy race, armed only with weapons of polished stone, and represented
at the present day by the Basques of the Pyrenees and the Asturias–the
Celts held rule in Spain, Gaul, and Britain, up to the date of the
several Roman conquests. A second great wave of Aryan immigration, that
of the Hellenic and Italian races, broke over the shores of the _Ægean_
and the Adriatic, where their cognate languages have become familiar to
us in the two extreme and typical forms of the classical Greek and
Latin. A third wave was that of the Teutonic or German people, who
followed and drove out the Celts over a large part of central and
western Europe; while a fourth and final swarm was that of the Slavonic
tribes, which still inhabit only the extreme eastern portion of the
continent.

With the Slavonians we shall have nothing to do in this enquiry; and
with the Greek and Italian races we need only deal very incidentally.
But the Celts, whom the English invaders found in possession of all
Britain when they began their settlements in the island, form the
subject of another volume in this series, and will necessarily call for
some small portion of our attention here also; while it is to the
Germanic race that the English stock itself actually belongs, so that we
must examine somewhat more closely the course of Germanic immigration
through Europe, and the nature of the primitive Teutonic civilisation.

The Germanic family of peoples consisted of a race which early split up
into two great hordes or stocks, speaking dialects which differed
slightly from one another through the action of the various
circumstances to which they were each exposed. These two stocks are the
High German and the Low German (with which last may be included the