Of the Visigothic, as of the Lombardic, it has to be said that, so far as extant specimens are concerned, it might {42}well have been the offspring of the Carolingian, rather than an elder form of writing. Its kinship, however, to "Merowingian" and "Lombardic" is undeniable, and there is a very fair show of probability that the Visigoths had something to do with it, notwithstanding the fact that we only know it in examples later than the destruction of the Gothic monarchy in Spain. What the term Visigothic means we do not know. Most people think it meant West Gothic, and that is how it was interpreted by Jornandes, who, as an Italian Ostrogoth of the sixth century, ought to have been capable of understanding the sense of the word. It is, however, very uncertain; for Jornandes, though intelligent and well-informed, was not impeccable even as regards his Gothic kinsmen. Most of his knowledge was derived from his Latin education, and to him probably we owe a good many misconceptions, arising from his acceptance of various geographical names in Latin and Greek writers as referring to his own people and their kindred. Nothing which he has said has had a more enduring influence upon opinion than the statement that Scandinavia, the "vagina gentium," had bred all the barbaric tribes which overpowered the Roman empire. Of course, he knew nothing of Scandinavia beyond the vague facts that Goths, Heruli, Burgundians, Lombards, and Cimbri inhabited the southern shores of the Baltic, and that there was a vast land beyond that sea. Everything that descended from the north seemed to have come down from Scania, or Scandinavia. He did not know, as we do, that the climate of Scandinavia must have been at that time much more severe than now, and that the population of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark cannot have reached in the fourth and fifth centuries to anything like its present numbers. The movements of that age, which carried millions of warriors to Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and Africa, represented a wave of emigration, caused by an overflow of population, beginning in the far East, on the confines of China, of which the typical originators, so far as {43}Europe is concerned, were the Huns. No such overflow was possible from Scandinavia.