an exclusively Germanic-speaking people.  The northernmost “Celts,” such as the Highland Scotch, are in all probability a specialized offshoot of this race.  What these people spoke before they were Celticized nobody knows, but there is nothing whatever to indicate that they spoke a Germanic language.  Their language may quite well have been as remote from any known Indo-European idiom as are Basque and Turkish to-day.  Again, to the east of the Scandinavians are non-Germanic members of the race—­the Finns and related peoples, speaking languages that are not definitely known to be related to Indo-European at all.

[Footnote 181:  “Dolichocephalic.”]

[Footnote 182:  “Brachycephalic.”]

We cannot stop here.  The geographical position of the Germanic languages is such[183] as to make it highly probable that they represent but an outlying transfer of an Indo-European dialect (possibly a Celto-Italic prototype) to a Baltic people speaking a language or a group of languages that was alien to Indo-European.[184] Not only, then, is English not spoken by a unified race at present but its prototype, more likely than not, was originally a foreign language to the race with which English is more particularly associated.  We need not seriously entertain the idea that English or the group of languages to which it belongs is in any intelligible sense the expression of race, that there are embedded in it qualities that reflect the temperament or “genius” of a particular breed of human beings.

[Footnote 183:  By working back from such data as we possess we can make it probable that these languages were originally confined to a comparatively small area in northern Germany and Scandinavia.  This area is clearly marginal to the total area of distribution of the Indo-European-speaking peoples.  Their center of gravity, say 1000 B.C., seems to have lain in southern Russia.]

[Footnote 184:  While this is only a theory, the technical evidence for it is stronger than one might suppose.  There are a surprising number of common and characteristic Germanic words which cannot be connected with known Indo-European radical elements and which may well be survivals of the hypothetical pre-Germanic language; such are house, stone, sea, wife (German Haus, Stein, See, Weib).]

Many other, and more striking, examples of the lack of correspondence between race and language could be given if space permitted.  One instance will do for many.  The Malayo-Polynesian languages form a well-defined group that takes in the southern end of the Malay Peninsula and the tremendous island world to the south and east (except Australia and the greater part of New Guinea).  In this vast region we find represented no less than three distinct races—­the Negro-like Papuans of New Guinea and Melanesia, the Malay race of Indonesia, and the Polynesians of the outer islands.  The Polynesians and Malays all speak languages of the Malayo-Polynesian group, while the languages of the Papuans belong partly to this group (Melanesian), partly to the unrelated languages ("Papuan”) of New Guinea.[185] In spite of the fact that the greatest race cleavage in this region lies between the Papuans and the Polynesians, the major linguistic division is of Malayan on the one side, Melanesian and Polynesian on the other.