It is true that Herodotus, as well as Thucydides, spoke of the Pelasgians as using a foreign tongue. So a German writer would naturally describe the English, and yet the English language, by one of its main ingredients, bears conclusive testimony to the Saxon element of the English nation, and also illustrates the relative positions, which the Saxon and Norman races are known in history to have occupied. The tongue of the Pelasgians had been subject within Greece to influence and admixture from the language of the Hellic tribes: beyond Greece it had received impressions from different sources; and naturally, after the consequences of this severance had worked for centuries, the speech of the Pelasgians would be barbarous in the eyes of the Greeks. Again, Marsh[389] observes that, in the very chapter where he distinguishes Pelasgic from Hellenic, Herodotus (i. 56) declares the Ionians to belong to one of these stocks, the Dorians to the other: both of which populations were in his time undoubtedly Greek. And the historian gives another strong proof that the Pelasgians were Greek, where he assigns to this parentage (ii. 52) the Greek name of the gods: θεοὺς δὲ προσωνόμασάν σφεας ἀπὸ τοῦ τοιούτου, ὅτι κόσμῳ θέντες τὰ πάντα πρήγματα κ.τ.λ. Even if we suppose, as may have been the case, that the Pelasgi mentioned by Herodotus, and by Thucydides, spoke a tongue as far from the Greek actually known to either of them, as is German from the English language at the present day, yet by its affinities that tongue might still remain a conclusive proof, that the ancestors of those who spoke it must have formed an essential ingredient in the composition of the nation. The evidence, which we know to be good in the one case, might be equally valid in the other. There is abundance of testimony among authors, both Greek and Roman, to establish the relation of the Pelasgi to the old forms of the language of both countries. It is enough for the present to refer to the Second Chapter of Bishop Marsh’s Horæ Pelasgicæ for a very able and satisfactory discussion of the question. I shall presently have to consider the particular complexion of the words which the Greek nation appear to have derived from Pelasgic sources, and the inferences which that complexion suggests. But this will best be done, when we have examined into the Homeric import of the Hellenic and Pelasgian proper names. _Pelasgian route into Greece._ We have next to examine the question, By what route is it most probable that this Pelasgian nation came into Greece? On this subject there can hardly be any other than one of two suppositions: the first, that by Thrace, or by the islands of the north, they reached Thessaly: the other, that they crossed from Asia, to the south of the Ægean, by the islands which divide the spaces of that sea.