From the Goths there was now a new offshoot, one destined to power and preëminence in the future of the human race. While the greater number of them remained in the country which for some eighteen centuries has been loosely called Germany, a large body of them moved northward and took possession of the countries now known as Denmark, Sweden and Norway, with the neighboring islands. These people are known ethnologically as the Scandinavians; and it is from them, and from some very near neighbors of theirs, also of Gothic race, who settled in the country in and about the lower part of Jutland (the old name of Denmark), that the English people, of whom we are a part, are descended.[D] It so happened that in the continuance of the westward movement of the Aryan people there was a union on the island of Great Britain, of emigrants from Denmark and the neighboring country on the continent, and from the western part of the great northern Scandinavian peninsula (Norway); and the result of that union, which was some eight centuries in forming, was the English people, by whom chiefly this country was settled only some two hundred and fifty years ago, and by whom its laws, its religion, its manners and customs and its language were determined and established. It is with the last of these, language, that we are here concerned. What that language is, and how it became what it is, will be the subject of our next paper. [A] “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.” Georgicon II, 490. [B] The grammar, it is to be said, is far more like that of the Greek than like that of the Latin language. [C] There is a language, the Lithuanian, spoken by a Leth-Slavonic people, northwest of the Baltic, near Poland, which has preserved in a remarkable and unique manner forms of the old Aryan speech which are extinct in other European tongues. But it is the language of a small, rude, unimportant people, without a literature, and indeed was not written until the sixteenth century. It is of great interest to the student of comparative philology, but of none to us at present.