position than the statesman already referred to, who maintains the truth of ancient Scripture avowedly without any knowledge of the Hebrew tongue. Language, as Lord Southesk most accurately, and pertinently points out, “is a thing that seems like a boomerang, so queer are the twists it takes, and so uncertain its returns.” Ethnology, or Anthropology--whichever its votaries choose to call it--is not, as I think, a science. It consists of the conceits and assumptions of men learned and unlearned who have reached certain conclusions, and who profess to bring back from the depths of prehistoric antiquity facts which may not be facts, or which at least we have no means of knowing to be true. The whole subject is “feeble, perplexed, and to all appearance, confused.” Many years since Mr. Hyde Clarke, at a meeting of the Ethnological Society, remarking on the utterances of Professor Huxley, suggested that, although the latter “had laid down his statements as established by men of science, there was little capable of proof.” What then is the value of a study, the results of which are as unstable as the passing vapour? It was a conception of the late Sir David Brewster, that _science_ is the only earthly treasure we can carry with us to a better state. Let us hope that if _Language_, and its _twin sister_ be among the number destined thither, they will be freed from their mundane misconceptions and uncertainties. The Reviewer of the _Literary World_ thinks I “make a sorry jumble of races and languages. All sorts of people, and tribes, dialects, and remains, related and unrelated, are said to be Goths or Gothic,” though in dealing with my shortcomings, real or supposed, he does not always keep faith with facts. The ancient Scythians, he makes me to say, were Goths, for which the only foundation is that I cite Dr. Macculloch and Mr. Planché from each a paragraph in which the name Scythian is mentioned. “The occupiers of prehistoric lake dwellings Goths.” Precisely what I do not say. I mention the facts that “a species of combat called _holmgang_, peculiar to the old Northmen, was usually fought in a small island or holm in a lake,” and that islands in lakes were places resorted to by the Scandinavian “foude,” or magistrate, with his law officers, &c. In Iceland, the men on whom sentence of death had been passed, were beheaded upon an islet in a lake or river. I submit these facts to the candid consideration of those who are capable of judging, because if my conjecture be correct, palisaded islands were neither inhabited nor are they prehistoric. “The Caledonians, Goths; the Picts, Goths.” I was taught to believe that Pict and Caledonian are convertible terms. “The Icelanders and others were Goths.” I do not, of course, know which “others” the reviewer may have had in his mind, but the Icelanders are certainly Goths. “Sometimes,” the critic says, “Gothic appears as the equivalent of Scandinavian.” Certainly as opposed to Celtic. “And the sum of the