Words and places Author:Isaac Taylor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE ETHNOLOGICAL VALUE OF LOCAL NAMES. Local names are thf beacon-lights of primeval History—The method of rt- search illustrated by American ... more »Names—Recent progress of Ethnology— The Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Northmen—Retrocession of the Scla-jes— Araliic Names—Ethnology of mountain districts—The Alps. Ethnology is the science which derives the greatest aid from geographical etymology. The names which still remain upon our maps are able to supply us with traces of the history of nations that have left us no other memorials. Egypt has bequeathed to us her pyramids, her temples, and her tombs; Nineveh her palaces ; Judrea her people and her sacred books ; Mexico her temple-mounds; Arabia her science; India hei institutions and her myths; Greece her deathless literature ; and Rome has left us her roads, her aqueducts, her laws, and the languages which still live on the lips of half the civilized world. But there are other nations which once played a prominent part in the world's history, but which have bequeathed no written annals, which have constructed no monuments, whose language is dying or is dead, whose blood is becoming undis- tinguishably mingled with that of other races. The knowledge of the history and the migrations of such tribes must be recovered from the study of the names of the places which they once inhabited, but which now know them no more— from the names of the hills which they fortified, of the rivers by which they dwelt, of the distant mountains upon which they gazed. As an eloquent writer has observed, " Mountains and rivers still murmur the voices of nations long denations'ized or extirpated." Language adheres to the soil when the race bywhich it was spoken has been swept from off the earth, or when its remnants have been driven from the pl...« less