is marked with a great variety of good engravings, and Dr. Ferguson, from whom such a book is truly a condescension, has given a luminous account of the ancient Assyrian history, of the place which that empire holds in the scheme of prophecy, and of the events which led to the discovery of its remains. It is a great thing for the rising generation when such men will undertake such works.

Liber Cantabrigiensis: an Account of the Aids afforded to Poor Students, the Encouragements offered to Diligent Students, and the Rewards conferred on Successful Students in the University of Cambridge; to which is prefixed a Collection of Maxims, Aphorisms, &c., designed for the Use of Learners. By Robert Potts, M.A., Trinity College. Cambridge: Parker. 1855.

The title of this book will be all the review it can require; it will be invaluable both to students, and to parents and guardians. They will learn what advantages every school has, and what peculiarities in the way of endowment every college presents. We have only one suggestion to make, which is, that in the next edition-and we hope it will be an annual one—the aphorisms and maxims be left out; they are bound to the rest by a very slender thread of connection, and are almost as much out of place as they would be by way of a preface to Wood's Algebra.

Hand-book of Light and Shade, with especial reference to Model Drawing. By Mrs. Merrifield. With numerous Illustrations. London Rowney. 1855.

No work of Mrs. Merrifield on the subject of Drawing can be otherwise than valuable, and we can conscientiously recommend the present as an excellent commencement in model drawing. It is copiously illustrated and purely scientific in principle.

Thoughts on Life, and other Poems. By J. Priest. London: Partridge, Oakey, and Co. 1855.

We have looked in vain for a single line of poetry in all this rhyme. If before he had sent the volume to the printer's Mr. Priest had given himself the trouble to turn some of it into plain prose, he would have found it was not worth writing, much less printing, and it is only made worse by being "upset" into verse.

ART. I.-1. The Ethnology of the British Islands. By R. G. LATHAM, M.D. London. 1854.

2. The Ethnology of Europe.

London. 1854.

By R. G. LATHAM, M.D.

3. Man and his Migrations. By R. G. LATHAM, M.D. London. 1855.

DR. LATHAM has deserved well of the learned and, indeed, of the general public, for having both devoted himself with no ordinary ability and concentration to his subject, and having produced several volumes as the result of his labours, which possess the comprehensiveness of an encyclopædia, for those who may wish to peruse the subject in extenso; and at the same time a series of volumes each a manageable and not too profound an essay on a separate branch of the inquiry. As at once a linguist and anatomist, the author brings to his inquiry an amount of preparation as indispensible as rarely combined. We shall have a word to say by and bye in criticism on his exact scholarship, in the ordinary sense of the term; but are well aware that the philological attainment desirable for this inquiry is rather the power of generalising rules and detecting analogies, than in grammatical accuracy or idiomatic nicety. In noticing three of Dr. Latham's four publications, it will be fairer to him and more instructive to our readers to give first a sketch of the learned author's own views on the early origin and migration of nations, and then a correction of some of his positions suggested by the writings of other ethnologists, or by our own more popular speculations on the subject.

VOL. XXXVIII.

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There seems little to except against in his views on the Ethnology of the British Isles." For though the early and later admixture of races is great, and certainly not underrated by the author; the leading facts, with two important exceptions, occurred within the historic period, and the languages have remained as living tongues to our own, or nearly our own, times. The date of the earliest Celtic occupation of these islands is obviously lost in the mist of a remote antiquity. But some approximation to the era might be attained by the ingenious scale of progress in migration, estimated in the author's more general view of the movements of the human race. One doubt we think he may dismiss to which he gives unnecessary space and weight-the existence of any earlier race than that of the Celts in these islands. There is no evidence, or indeed probability, of such predecessors; while the three leading types of original inhabitants—the British, represented by the modern Welsh, the extinct Picts, and the Erse or native Irish and Gælic septsare all undoubtedly Celtic, though possibly owing distinctive characteristics of manner and language to the Continental tribes from which they originated or by which they were

crossed.

Some interesting light is thrown, and from an unexpected quarter, on the comparative civilization and mineral industry of the Western Britons, as alluded to in the later Greek or Byzantine writers. Though the Picts, as a race, were probably exterminated by the Gaels, or absorbed in the growing civilization of the Anglo-Saxons, it is evident that their dialect of the Celtic, neither Cambro British nor Gælic, still lives in the names of mountains and other localities in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and the Isle of Man. Helvellyn and Blaencathra would have been called in Wales HoelVoel-Llyn and Cader-wen, cognate but not identical forms. The language of the Manx of this day-Celtic, with a strong infusion of Danish-is probably the richest depository of the ancient language of North_Britain. The peculiarities of the Erse are more permanent. It is cognate with but yet strikingly dissimilar to the Welsh. As guttural and highly aspirated, there is a bolder attempt at defining and modifying sense by combination, and some effort at the simpler inflexions of those later tongues that have arisen from a Latin or German source. Now it is remarkable that all the earliest Irish traditions point at an intercourse with people from the south, rather than with the more probable natives of our own island. This is remarkable as being in itself unlikely. Nor

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is the intercourse referred to by any means flattering to national pride. Now, however little we should trust such ancient and vague traditions in support of any one particular fact that might be invented or mis-stated, it is not wise to reject the general inference from a mass of tradition consistent with itself, and evidently not the suggestion of national pride or obvious probability. Therefore, without going so far as to consider the Fomorians* and other dark southern invaders of Ireland either so ancient or remote as the Carthaginians, we may assume there was an early intercourse between Ireland and the regions directly south of it -Spain, for instance, and South-Western France.

The commerce of Ireland, or perhaps more properly the access of commerce to her shores, was greater in the time of Tacitus than that of the British ports. The type of the people is to this day, in character and physiognomy, far more southern than is warranted by their latitude. In laziness, superstition, revenge, and excitement, they are Gascons or Castilians stranded on a northern isle. The beggar boys of Connemara might have sat to Murillo, and many an aged crone is worthy of the pencil of Velasquez. A new light is thrown on this early connection of Ireland with Aquitania, to use an obvious but undefined geographical term, by the striking similarity of the native Irish with the Celtic patois of the Waldenses, until lately spoken in the neighbourhood of Lyons; a language which still lingers in the proper names of that part of France. As an instance of which we may give the name of the celebrated actor Talma, which, unmeaning to a Parisian, signified earth in the dialect of his native Dauphiny, and would have been understood in that sense in Galway or Sligo.

This evidence of remote connection is highly suggestive, even should we abandon the theory of early maritime intercourse. For it would then appear that in the earliest age of European settlement, Erse Celts were spread through Gaul and Britain, as Aquitanians or Silurians, as well as in Ireland; and that a later irruption of Gallo-British Celts broke in between them, separating, isolating and pushing aside the dissevered fragments: and thus, as in pursuing a geological formation, we must pass over the intrusive irruption and look for the continuance of our strata beyond it.

Gaul would appear too to have had its three successive waves, so to say, of Celtic occupation down to the time of

* See Moore's History of Ireland.—Vol. I.

Cæsar, when all further movement was arrested by Roman conquest, and every nationality merged in provincial organisation. We conceive the Aquitanians to have been the earliest Celtic population of Gaul, mixed probably with the Iberians of Spain and the Mediterranean shore, and to have been pushed into the south-west by the weight of the Celts proper or Gauls, who occupied three fourths of modern France; and who in their turn were in the very act of being encroached on by the Belgæ of the north-east, a Celtic race too though probably mixed with Teutonic tribes, at the moment when their history begins and ends in " Cæsar's Commentaries."

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We have been insensibly led on from Dr. Latham's special view of the ethnology of these islands to his more general volume on the early population of Europe; but there is little further to comment on in his notice of our own early history. For the Roman occupation, the Saxon colonisation, the Danish inroads, and Norman conquest, are all well ascertained historic facts; open to no other discussion than the degree in which they modified the population and language of the country. Many of these considerations will be best entertained at the close of this paper, when we shall comment on the author's theory of the variations of language. Professor Creasy, in his elegant and impartial " Essay on the Constitution," has pointed out an interesting and significant list of English words of British origin, which from their relation to female occupations, suggests the inference that the Saxon invasion did not exterminate, but rather absorbed a considerable portion of the British female population. Mr. Raikes, at the opening of his historical treatise on the same subject, has extended this list, and likewise pointed out the curious philological re-conquest of our language by certain Celtic words, for centuries expelled from England, but re-appearing under Norman colours, having been adopted by the descendants of Rollo from the provincials of Neustria. Baron is one of the most important, and mutton and mustard two of the most familiar of those instances.

It had long been suspected that the Saxon settlement, even if it commenced at the date and under the circumstances usually assigned to it, was hardly likely to have been so total an extermination of the settled and comparatively civilized provincials as is assumed. Yet the transfer of power, property, laws, and manners, seems to have been complete; so that Mr. Creasy's view may be a very probable compromise between the different degrees of extermination insisted on by historians. The Danish settlements were but