V. Quinti Kulpiansi turke: Velus Quintius Culpiano dedit. How can anyone be blind to the concord of Aulesi to Clensi ? But Mr. Taylor puts Aulesi and Metellis in apposition; while Metellis ostensibly is genitive. He really counts on our credulity too much, in expecting us to swallow the translation Sansl unworthy.' Now I will add my conjecture. Of course I do not pretend to write what is true, but only what is plausible and admissible as guesswork. Aulesi Metellis Ve. Vesial clensi sincera amicitiæ. This syntax appears to run like Greek and Latin, with less constraint and better concord than the Turkish inversions give. Space does not allow me here to assign reasons for the conjecture. He Mr. Taylor carefully discusses the celebrated words Avil Ril, concerning which Niebuhr remarked that the only words in Etruscan agreed upon were these two, yet it was not known which meant Vixit and which meant Annos. Mr. Taylor insists that both are nouns. interprets Avil, Aivil and Avils (which he seems to treat as equivalent) age, ætas. Informing us that the Etruscans turned Ajax (Greek Aias) into Aivas. he proceeds to derive Aivil from 'Turkish' Ajil future (futurus, venturus), entirely passing by Latin Aevum (aivum) and Greek aion, from root tion is arbitrary. Of his sixteen inscriptions (lecture, p. 7) the uniform suggestion is that of double or triple concord, as Avils huths; Avils kis; Avils sas; Avils kis kealxls. In Latin and Greek, One, Two, Three are declinable, so are the hundreds, &c., but not the other digits, nor the tens; but all might have been so. As the Latins say Tres anni, Annorum duorum, so here the primâ facie inference is that Avils must be plural, whatever the case. Yet Avils might be genitive singular with Annos understood, which is sometimes expressed. Ril means years, according to Mr. Taylor, but the vacillations as to final s are very embarrassing; and if Ril be plural, what becomes of the doctrine that plurals end in -ar, Turkish -lar? M. Jaubert and other French grammarians tell us that the Turkish language has not a single exception to its rules; but from end to end is as regular as if constructed by a learned man at his desk. The Etruscan gives no augury of such a genius. Still we may tentatively render Avils LX, Aetatis LX; Avils ril LX, Aetatis annos LX; Avil ril LX, Aetas (ejus erat) anni LX. But whether Ril would serve as both nominative and accusative, we do not know. Excluding the question of final s, Mr. Taylor has profitably and acutely analysed these formula. We have but to cast aside his endless talk about the Ugrian, and we may learn something from him. He declares his belief to be that which, he says, is becoming generally accepted, that before the advent of the Aryans, the whole of Europe was occupied by a race of Turanian aborigines, to whom the Siculians, Pelasgians, Iberians, Ligurians, Aquitanians, and Silures belonged, whose language also is now represented by the speech of the Finns, Lapps, and Basques (why not add, and of the Magyars?) To this he adds his own more definite belief that in Etruria two streams of Turanian invasion overwhelmed the earlier inhabitants; the Raséna or Tursena, that is, those whom the Romans called Etruscans, being the last. This last invasion undoubtedly came upon Umbrians, an Aryan race. Thus he has four strata, the second Umbrian, the fourth Tyrsene, therefore the second and fourth must mean Siculian and Pelasgian. Nevertheless, our only notices of these tribes represent both as coming into Italy upon an Umbrian or Oscan people. Now as absolutely no new information for the last fifty years has come to us concerning Siculians, Pelasgians, or Ligurians, any new notion of Oriental scholars on this subject is a gratuitous application to Europe of discoveries they have made concerning Asia. In Asia a Turanian population underlies; therefore the same is probable in Europe.' By no means. Whence did the vast Aryan population come, to overwhelm Turanians so widely dispersed? William Humboldt studied the Basque intently, and could not discover relations to Tartary, but said its analogies reminded him of native American languages. Mr. Taylor claims the Albanian (Arnaut) language as akin to Etruscan; but scholars are agreed that, remote as it is from our tongues, it is certainly Aryan. Its pronouns are remarkable. It says U, Une, for Ego, Na for Nos (Na is Arabic, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Kabyle), Tu for Thou, Yû for You. Of the Ligurians only one word is known, Bodencos, their name for the river Po, and Pliny interprets it as bottomless. Prichard remarks that this is like German Bodenlos in disguise. The Siculians were inferred by Ottfried Müller to be akin to the Latins, because Sikeliot Greek, to judge by about nine words, had the aspect of being Latinised. Prichard accepts this, provisionally; and with good reason: Latium is of very small area. It is hardly credible that a speech so deeply divided from Oscan and Umbrian as is the Latin can have grown up on so narrow a spot. Ages free from invasion would have been needed. Other Italian races must have talked Latin, and not one but the Siculi can be plausibly named. They migrated over the whole of Italy, until they settled on its extreme island, conquering the Iberian Sicani whom they found there. Not one of these southern European races is justly claimed as Turanian. But what of Pelasgians? What? Why, every mention of them in Italy describes them as immigrants upon an earlier population; a very few, I think, from the Greek seas. Prichard took great pains on this point, and affirmed that they nearly all came into Italy from the north-east, i.e. from Illyria or Epirus. This (with me) suggests that they were Arnauts; for that they were barbarians to the Greeks, I cannot doubt. But inasmuch as Homer's notices of them and Herodotus's experience of them utterly contradict the notions of the later Greeks expressed in the Tragedians and in Herodotus, it is not likely that for a long time yet scholars will be in agreement. It may be worth while here to notice that in the temple of Dodona, among barbarous Chaonians and Molossians, Pelasgian Zeus was worshipped; and by fragments of Hyperides, discovered in the last twenty years or less, it is clear that the wife of Zeus was there revered by the name Diônè, known to us only in the 6th book of the Iliad. Dionè therefore is apparently the Pelasgian name of Juno: another mark that the Pelasgians, if nonGreek, were yet Aryan. Space scarcely admits more comment now: the mass of material may afford a new article, if the present writer feel competent, and the editor approve; yet a few words may be added concerning Mr. Taylor's attempt to enlighten Latin etymology. He selects the words Arbiter, Celer, Ager, Securis, Sagitta, I may add Porcus; which he fancies are non- -Aryan, and admit elucidation from Tartary, Siberia, and Lapland. (1) It is new to me that any scholar questions Ar in Arbiter and Arcesso (= Accerso) to mean Ad. In Umbrian we have Ar or Arh for the Latin Ad; nay, in other words also rh for d; thus the Latin name Attidius is in Umbrian Attirhius. The verb Betere, or Bitere, to go (compare Greek ẞn, Baréw) is found in ἔβη, βατέω) Plautus; and Mr. Taylor has no pretence whatever for setting aside the received explanation Ar-biter, a comer up, or, as we say, a bystander, who decides a quarrel by his own common sense, unfettered by law. (2) Celer is universally compared with the Greek Kéλns, Eolic kéne, which Mr. Taylor ignores. But in any case he may as well pretend that keλns is not pure Greek, as that Celer is not pure Latin. To demand Aryan congeners as essential to native roots is a fundamental mistake. (3) Ager is notoriously the Greek ypos and the English Acre. It is not the less pure Aryan though it is still more widely diffused, being also in Arabic and Hebrewperhaps imported; Arabic 'Ekar, to work on the soil; whence 'Ekkâr, but in Hebrew, 'Ikkâr, agricola. We cannot be surprised to find Aker among the Lapps; nor is it requisite to deny that Turkoman kyr (I know only Turkish and Turkoman yer), earth, ground, are connected with it. (4) Securis, an axe, having ར 6 [July short e, is a natural development within Latin from the verb Seco. As such our dictionaries give it. What right has Mr. Taylor to say, There is no accepted Aryan etymology for this word,' and run to the Finns and Siberians to find it from Sabine Curis (Quiris), a one? But, forsooth, he also derives is identical with Gaelic Coir (Quir), spear; and does not know that this Aryan connection, though pera spear; so that he is proving its versely. Coir is indeed only a modification of Irish Carr, Welsh Par, English Spear, Spire, Spar. (5) Sagitta is the Gaelic Saighead, derived from the native verb Sgath, to cut, to lop; whence also Sgian, a knife. That its Sg represents Sc of Latins cannot be doubted, but Scid (in Scindo) is the nearest Latin. I believe the primitive sense of Sagitta was simply a shaft; but from it came Anglo-Saxon Scotjan, Sceotan, and English shoot. In my opinion it is not original in Latin, but, as other military, religious, and political words, came in with Sabine pre-eminence. (6) Porcus is Umbrian; Varken, Dutch; Ferkel, German; but Latin Porcus, Verres, point to a higher root, of two consonants only, seen Anglo-Saxon Farr, a wild Boar. in Verre, aside useless restlessness and his Until Mr. Isaac Taylor will lay trust in diligence, no erudition, no activity the untrustworthy, no of mind, ridiculous error. can save him from above all things dangerous to the False lights are pilot in dark and landlocked seas; searcher in dark antiquity. are they to the language SO MODERN WARFARE. TO THE EDITOR OF FRASER'S MAGAZINE. SIR,-The article on modern warfare in your last June number contains statements of so great importance to public interests that I do not hesitate to ask you to spare me space for a question or two respecting it, which by answering, your contributor may make the facts he has brought forward more valuable for practical issues. 6 The statistics given in the second column of page 695, on which 'P. S. C.' rests his incontestable' conclusion, that battles are less sanguinary than they were,' are incomplete in this vital respect, that they furnish us only with the proportion, and not with the total number, of combatants slain. A barricade fight between a mob of rioters a thousand strong, and a battery of artillery, in which fifty reformers get shot, is not 'less sanguinary than a street quarrel between three topers, of whom one gets knocked on the head with a pewter pot: though no more than the twentieth part of the forces on one side fall in the first case, and a third of the total forces engaged, in the second. Nor could it be proved, by the exhibition of these proportions of loss, that the substitution of explosive shells, as offensive weapons, for pewter pots, rendered wounds less painful, or war more humane. Now, the practical difference between ancient and modern war as carried on by civilized nations, is, broadly, of this kind. Formerly, the persons who had quarrelled settled their differences by the strength of their own arms, at the head of their retainers, with comparatively inexpensive weapons, such as they could conveniently wield; weapons which they had paid for out of their own pockets, and with which they struck only the people they meant to strike. While, now-a-days, persons who quarrel fight at a distance, with mechanical apparatus, for the manufacture of which they have taxed the public, and which will kill anybody who happens to be in the way; gathering at the same time, to put into the way of them, as large a quantity of senseless and innocent mob as can be beguiled, or compelled, to the slaughter. So that, in the words of your contributor, 'Modern armies are not now small fractions of the population whence they are drawn; they represent— in fact, are-whole nations in arms.' I have only to correct this somewhat vague and rhetorical statement by pointing out that the persons in arms, led out for mutual destruction, are by no means whole nation' on either side, but only the individuals of it who are able-bodied, honest, and brave, selected to be shot, from among its invalids, rogues, and cowards. 'the The deficiencies in your contributor's evidence as to the totality of loss do not, however, invalidate his conclusion that, out of given numbers engaged, the mitrailleuse kills fewer than the musket. It is, nevertheless, a very startling conclusion, and one not to be accepted without closer examination of the statistics on which it is based. I will, therefore, tabulate them in a simpler form, which the eye can catch easily, omitting only one or two instances which add nothing to the force of the evidence. In the six undernamed battles of bygone times, there fell, according to your contributor's estimate, out of the total combatants Now, there is a very important difference in the character of the battles named in these two lists. Every one of the first six was decisive, and both sides knew that it must be so when the engagement began, and did their best to win. But Königgratz was only decisive by sudden and appalling demonstration of the power of a new weapon. Solferino was only half fought, and not followed up because the French Emperor had exhausted his corps d'élite at Magenta, and could not (or, at least, so it is reported) depend on his troops of the line. Worth was an experiment; Sedan a discouraged ruin; Gravelotte was, I believe, well contested, but I do not know on what extent of the line, and we have no real evidence as to the power of modern machines for death, until the proportions are calculated, not from the numbers engaged, but from those under fire for equal times. Now, in all the upper list of battles, probably every man of both armies was under fire, and some of the regiments under fire for half the day; while in the lower list of battles, only fragments of the line were hotly engaged, and the dispute on any point reaching its intensity would be ended in half an hour. That the close of contest is so rapid may indeed be one of the conditions of improvement in our military system alleged by your correspondent, and the statistics he has brought forward do indeed clearly prove one of two things— either that modern weapons do not kill, or that modern soldiers do not fight, as effectually as in old times. I do not know if this is thought a desirable change in military circles; but I, as a poor civilian, beg to express my strong objections to being taxed six times over what I used to be, either for the equipment of soldiers who rarely fight, or the manufacture of weapons which rarely kill. It may be perfectly true that our last cruise on the Baltic was less sanguinary' than that which concluded in Copenhagen. But we shook hands with the Danes after fighting them, and the differences between us were ended: while our expensive contemplation of the defences of Cronstadt leaves us still in daily dread of an inspection by the Russian of those of Calcutta. It is true that the ingenuity of our inventors is far from being exhausted, and that in a few years more, we may be able to destroy a regiment round a corner and bombard a fleet over the horizon; but I believe the effective result of these crowning scientific successes will only be to confirm the at present partial impression on the minds of military and naval officers, that their duty is rather to take care of their weapons than to use them. a England will expect' of her generals and admirals to maintain dignified moral position as far as possible out of the enemy's sight: and in a perfectly scientific era of seamanship we shall see two adverse fleets affected by a constant law of mutual repulsion at distances of two or three hundred miles; while, in either squadron, an occasional collision between the leading ships, or inexplicable foundering of the last improved ones, will make these prudential manœuvres on the whole as destructive of the force, and about ten times more costly to the pocket, of the nation than the ancient, and, perhaps, more honour |