These assertions require to be
carefully examined, and it by no means follows that because an
English word is found in Celtic, therefore we get it from thence; but
they have not yet had the attention which, as illustrating through
language this matter of the subsistence and intermingling in our
nation of a Celtic part, they merit.
Nor have the physiological data which illustrate this matter had much
more attention from us in England. But in France, a physician, half
English by blood though a Frenchman by home and language, Monsieur W.
F. Edwards, brother to Monsieur Milne-Edwards, the well-known
zoologist, published in 1839 a letter to Monsieur Amedee Thierry with
this title: Des Caracteres Physiologiques des Races Humaines
consideres dans leurs Rapports avec l'Histoire. The letter attracted
great attention on the Continent; it fills not much more than a
hundred pages, and they are a hundred pages which well deserve
reading and re-reading. Monsieur Thierry in his Histoire des Gaulois
had divided the population of Gaul into certain groups, and the
object of Monsieur Edwards was to try this division by physiology.
Groups of men have, he says, their physical type which distinguishes
them, as well as their language; the traces of this physical type
endure as the traces of language endure, and physiology is enabled to
verify history by them.
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