Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity [pp. 250-294]

Apologetics.
less comprehensive limits of the Indo-Germanic family. Professor Rask of Copenhagen, the great Scandinavian ethnologist
and philologist, was, we believe, the first to suggest a hypothesis,
(now familiarly known to ethnologists as the Finnic Hypothesis,)
by which certain fragmentary and insignificant remnants of
people scattered over Europe, and Asia also, (the most familiar
of whom are the Basques of Biscay, and the Finns of the
extreme north,) were brought into relation with the same teeming centre of population, in the heart of Asia. These are
alleged to be the remains of a migration anterior even to the
Keltic, and underlying, so to speak, and cropping out at the
edges of the present European civilization, which is due to a
succession of inundations from the same prolific source, the ethnological analogues of whom are still to be found in similar
isolated spots in India itself-as exemplified by the mountain
tribes of the Dekhan, who are destitute of caste, and differ
in language, religion, government and social life, from the dominant races of Hindustan. Curiously enough, it is now alleged,
that late excavations, penetrating beneath the oldest Gothic
burying grounds, have brought to light skulls manifestly differing from those of the Keltic, or any of the later migrations, and
yet bearing a clear and close resemblance to the scattered wandering tribes whom this hypothesis regards as the remnants of
races which once covered this whole area, from Iceland to the
mouth of the Ganges, and which, in their turn, as the organic
affinities of the language clearly show, are only an older branch
of the same great family-the Japhetic.*
The connection between the Indo-European or Iranian lan guages and nations, and the Turanian, or Eastern Asiatic, has
been partially, but never quite fully investigated and determined.
* Among the works of high authority, on this department of the philological
argument, we may mention Bopp, Burnouf, Lassen, Pott, Benfey, W. Humboldt,
Lepsius and H6fer. The languages of Keltic origin have been investigated, inde pendently, by Prichard, Bopp, Meyer, Rosen, the brother of Professor Rosen, of
London University, and author of the Grammar of the important Ossetic lan guages of the Caucasus. And on the Meroitic and Nubian, as collateral with
the Egyptian, Lepsius is the great authority; while the Berber and connecting
languages of the African family, in their Asiatic relationships, have been made
accessible by Professor Newman of London. Many, very many of the evidences
and authorities now lying before us, we are compelled to pass without a reference.
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