of the soul. But in the time of Alexander the Great the chief strength of the Getæ is north of the Danube. An army of 10,000 foot and 4,000 horse tried to prevent his crossing that river, B.C. 335, but in vain. Though they were temporarily defeated by him, his successor Lysimachus, who endeavoured, in B.C. 292, to reach (it seems) the heart of their country, was surrounded, and forced to surrender with his army, in a vast region naturally deprived of water,* which was then called "the wilderness of the Getans." Soon after this, the great Gaulish movement, which issued in the invasion of Greece and of Asia Minor, brought about a war of Gauls and Getans; in which it is said a great number of Getans were captured and sold as slaves into Greece, where they received two prevalent names-viz. Geta and Davus. And now first it comes out that Davi and Getæ are either exchangeable names, or two parts of the same great race. The Greeks in general called them all Getæ; from the Romans we hear the name Daci also. Strabo says that the western branch, toward Germany, is the Daci; the eastern, on the Black Sea, is Getæ. Under Augustus, Dacian and Getan wars begin; the same continued, on and off, until Trajan, having concentrated the entire forces of the empire against them for near five years together, at length totally subdued them, and reduced their country to the form of a Roman province. Its limits were great. The province reached from the Teiss to the Pruth, from the Danube to the Carpathians; and comprised Moldavia, the Bukovina, Transylvania, Hungary east of the Teiss, the Banat, and Wallachia. The best part of a century passes, and the province of Dacia is filled with Roman colonies, is Latinised and emasculated, like Roman Britain. In the reign of Antoninus Pius "the Germans and Dacians" rebelled, but were crushed again. At length, in the reign of Caracalla, it appears that Dacia is partly in possession of a people called Gothi, who actively assail the Roman dominion, and are repelled by Caracalla.† Such is the account in Spartian. Dion Cassius has nothing of this in his book on Caracalla; but in a fragment of the next book he states that "the Dacians" ravaged some parts of Dacia, in order to recover the hostages which Caracalla had exacted of them. Since this historian elsewhere uses the terms Getæ and Daci as equivalent, we must suppose that he regarded the Gothi of Spartian to be unconquered or revolting portions of the Dacian people. Alexander Severus found them most dangerous and persevering

* This is supposed to be the steppe of Bessarabia.

It was jocosely proposed to surname Caracalla Geticus, in allusion to his murder of his brother Geta. The witticism implies that the Goths (on this first appearance of their name in history) were at once popularly identified with the Geta.

enemies, who spread their arms over all Dacia, which they had thoroughly conquered in the reign of Philip. The invaders (or insurgents?) are called Getæ, or Gothi, indifferently, by many writers of those days,-by Procopius, Capitolinus, Trebellius Pollio, Spartian, Vopiscus, Philostorgius, Augustin, Jerome (the most learned of all the fathers in languages and in ethnology), and by the Gothic bishop and abridger of history Jornandes. Many ancient writers called the Goths Scythians; not one, we believe, doubted their being the same people as the Geta of Herodotus. The diversity of name between Getæ and Gothi, according to Grimm, is only what we ought to expect in passing from high German into a southern tongue; much as kuni, muns, tunthus, hund, become genus, mens, dens, centum. Further, Grimm urges,-when, three and four centuries before Christ, the Get were notoriously a powerful people on the Danube and Black Sea, it is too much to suppose the whole nation annihilated. Its south-western part was weakened by Trajan's conquest of Dacia; but apparently the north-east portion not only held its ground, but acquired fresh strength. We cannot believe that the Getans were entirely rooted up, and that the Goths exactly took their place,-spreading along the north of the Black Sea and to the Crimea, where we find such names as Tyrigetæ and Massagetæ.

Nevertheless all the learned men of modern times until Grimm forbid us to believe that the Goths are the old Getæ. Gibbon speaks of it as Gothic credulity. Crevier says on this subject (Histoire des Empereurs, xxiii.) that when the Goths first possessed themselves of part of Dacia, "the Romans knew them so little, that they called them Getæ, from the name of the people who occupied the country anciently." Yet he clearly does not himself believe that they came from Sweden. In a very recent work, dated July 1853 (Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography), the learned writer, E. B. J., five years after Grimm's great work had appeared, did not hesitate to say (under DACIA): "It need hardly be added, that the theory which regarded the Getæ and the long-haired Goths of Scandinavia as equivalent names is entirely void of foundation."

On matters so delicate we dare not utter any thing dogmatic; but the dogmatism of learned writers does surprise us. Why call this identification a theory, when every ancient writer makes it a fact? We grant, that what men think to be facts are not so always; but we submit that the modern view which contradicts them is, even if correct, still a theory. Well: what is the ground of this great confidence of the moderns against the identification of Goths and Getans? It rests on the following argument: "The Goths were notoriously Germans;

the Getans were notoriously Thracians: but the Thracians cannot have been Germans; therefore neither were the Goths Getans."

On this it is to be remarked: 1. That when ancient writers associate the Getans with Thracians, it need not indicate more than their intimate political relations; in fact, we know that the Getans south of the Danube were at one time conquered by the Odrysan dynasty of Thrace. 2. When Herodotus says that, except the Indians, the Thracians are the greatest nation known to the Greeks, it is manifest that he extended the word Thracian very widely; just as did later writers extend the word Scythian, which Herodotus confines to the Scoloti. 3. No ancient author but Strabo says that the Getans and the Thracians had the same language. If such a writer as Jacob Grimm holds that the word of Strabo as to the identity of the language is insufficient to outweigh other probabilities, he certainly seems to deserve a respectful refutation, and not the cool contempt of E. B. J. 4. It is far from clear that the Gothic language could have been understood by a native of Germany in the days of Tacitus the historian, or of Tacitus the emperor. Grimm testifies to the strong diversity of the tongues; nor are we aware that the ancients by any means identified Goths and Germans as the moderns do. Perhaps if the Getan and the Thracian languages differed only as much as the Gothic and the German, the facility with which a Getan would understand a large part of the Thracian tongue may have been a sufficient foundation for Strabo's statement. It does seem to be resting too much upon it, if, for this sole reason, we are required to disbelieve the universal and absolutely unanimous agreement of the ancients that the Goths were the Getæ. As to the opinion of Crevier (which Dr. Latham has adopted), that a German people, not previously called Goths, received this name (Gothi or Geta) from the nation whose land they conquered,-it would have plausibility if they had been called Goths by the Romans only; but very little indeed, when we find it was the name by which they called themselves. On the whole, the opinion of Grimm seems primâ facie sober, and not contradicted by any known facts and testimonies, that the old German, the Gothic or Getan, the Dacian, the Thracian, the Macedonian languages, were a series of which no two were identical, and the extremes very remote; yet the whole so related, that no great chasm existed between the nearer links. We may quote his general result, p. 799:

"The German language lies between Greek, Latin, and Keltic, on the one side, and Slavonian, Lithuanian, Finnish, on the other; and is related to each of these, though in different degrees of nearness. But since Slavonians and Lithuanians do not reach to Greece, there would

be a gap in the chain of nations, were it not closed by Thrace, which is linked to Greece by Macedonia, and to Germany and Sarmatia by Dacia and Getica."

Undoubtedly Grimm plunges into a sea of uncertainty (nor do we intend to plunge after him), when he proceeds to use his vast learning and ingenuity to trace the double family of Dacians and Getans, in the far west and far east alike, by mere similarities of names. According to him, Dani means Dacini; so the Danes and Goths of Denmark and Sweden are Dacians and Getans. Indeed (he urges) Ptolemy expressly places the Gouti and Dauciones on his insular Scandinavia. From the tenth to the thirteenth century Latin writers used to say Dacus, Dacia, for Dane, Denmark; while to this day the Lapps call a Dane Dazh; and the Russians say Dattschanin, Datskoe, for the Danish people and language. When he proceeds to quote Servius, who says that the Danes are called from the Dahæ of the Caspian, and shows that he believes it, and claims the Sacæ of Independent Tartary as Germans, he certainly lowers our confidence in him as a safe guide.

Let us come back to Germany proper. According to Pliny, there were five classes of Germans: 1. the Vindili, beyond the Elbe; 2. the Ingævones, or people of the sea-coast and islands-the greatest of the "islands" being Sweden and Norway; 3. the Istævones, or inhabitants of the basin of the Rhine; 4. the Hermiones, or interior Germans of the highland; 5. the Bastarnæ, along the limits of Dacia, branches of whom touched the Black Sea, at the mouths of the Danube and Dniester. It is remarkable that Tacitus (in a passage quite inconsistent with the general tenor of his treatise) makes the second, third, and fourth branches of Pliny to be the only true Germans; and alone to be descended from 66 Mannus," the old German Adam. We think it a fair inference, that the population west of the Elbe talked a language peculiar to itself, and felt something decidedly foreign in the Vindili and Bastarnæ: how great the chasm, remains uncertain. But it is a signal rebuke to our linguistic attainments, that though the words Ingævones, Istævones, Hermiones, so clearly meant sea-coasters, river-sidemen, and highlanders, the German tongue, as now known, does not suffice for the explanation. The Vindili, or Pliny's first branch, are regarded by Dr. Latham as wholly un-German, being either old Prussian (i. e. Lettish) or Lithuanian, or Polish; especially the Lygii of Tacitus, on or about the Vistula, with much ingenuity he maintains to be (name and people) the same as the modern Lekhs, i. e. Poles; and though the earliest mention of the Lekhs is less favourable

*The Lygii invaded Gaul in the reign of the Emperor Probus, by whom they were repulsed; after which their name disappears from history, unless the Lechs

to his view than he represents it, we are disposed to acquiesce in this result until disproved. In fact, the argument is similar to that of Grimm about the Goths and Getæ. The names (Lygii and Lekh) are about as like. We have no evidence that the older people was destroyed* or migrated; hence the presumption is, that the newer are the descendants of the older.

But Latham goes further. The Gothones of Tacitus (Guttones of Pliny), in east Prussia,-who are by nearly all other writers unceremoniously accepted as Goths, from similarity of name, he maintains to have been "old" Prussians, of Lettish stock. Indeed Ptolemy, who as an astronomer is eminently precise in his statements, calls them Sarmatians. Latham ingeniously adduces, that in quite modern times the country people round Königsberg were reproached by the German population as Pagans, under the name Gudda. This subject is curious enough to deserve closer attention, as many of our readers may scarcely know who the "old Prussians" are. We will here give a condensed extract from Prichard's great work, vol. iii. p. 451: "The old Prussians, the Prutheni or Pruzii, had a peculiar system of religion and a hierarchy, which distinguishes them both from the Slavic and from the Germanic+ nations. Of all Europeans, they made the most obstinate resistance to Christianity— in part, it would appear, from the influence of their priests, who were governed by a pontiff,-at once legislator, supreme judge, and high-priest. His station has been compared to that of the grand lama of Thibet. Monkish writers called him the pope of the northern pagans. He lived retired in a dark forest, and was approached only by priests and priestesses, who interpreted his will to the profane laity."

The Teutonic knights of Prussia dedicated their arms to the task of extirpating the paganism of that region; but at the era of the Reformation the work was not complete. Dr. Latham informs us that Prætorius, a Pole, writing (A.D. 1688) a book called Orbis Gothicus, devoted a section to answer the question, "Why is the name Gudda a word of contempt in Prussia?" and his reply virtually is, that Gudda was the name of the old Pagans of that country: "Guddarum infidelium nomen existit, adeo ut

be the same; but of these we do not learn till the sixth or seventh century after Christ. This is the weak side of Dr. Latham's theory.

* Gibbon, chap. xii., supposes that the power of the nation was broken by the great defeat it received from Probus, and that the name vanished in consequence. It is evident in Tacitus, that Lygian was the name of a confederacy, as well as of a tribe; and the tribe may have remained obscure to history for several centuries, until it reappeared (in the same country) with the name Lech.

† Should not this be limited to the later ages? The German Semnones of Tacitus had a mysterious and sanguinary cultus; so had the Herodotean Scythians, whom Prichard holds to have been Slavonian. The temptation to intensify these supposed distinctions of races is great.