The Revolution of July 28, 1830




A SHORT HISTORY OF FRANCE.


CHAPTER I.

One of the greatest achievements of modern research is the discovery of
a key by which we may determine the kinship of nations. What we used
to conjecture, we now know. An identity in the structural form of
language establishes with scientific certitude that however diverse
their character and civilizations, Russian, German, Englishman,
Frenchman, Spaniard, are all but branches from the same parent stem,
are all alike children of the Asiatic Aryan.

So skilful are modern methods of questioning the past, and so
determined the effort to find out its secrets, we may yet know the
origin and history of this wonderful Asiatic people, and when and why
they left their native continent and colonized upon the northern shores
of the Mediterranean. Certain it is, however, that, more centuries
before the Christian era than there have been since, they had peopled
Western Europe.

This branch of the Aryan family is known as the Keltic, and was older
brother to the Teuton and Slav, which at a much later period followed
them from the ancestral home, and appropriated the middle and eastern
portions of the European Continent.