It is not to be imagined at what results the scholars of A.D. 3000 might arrive if they worked by present-day methods on names, linguistic remains, and the notion of original homes and migration. For example, the Teutonic Knights about 1300 drove out the heathen “Prussians,” and in 1870 these people suddenly appear on their wanderings at the gates of Paris! The Romans, pressed by the Goths, emigrate from the Tiber to the lower Danube! Or a part of them perhaps settled in Poland, where Latin was spoken? Charlemagne on the Weser defeated the Saxons, who thereupon emigrated to the neighbourhood of Dresden, their places being taken by the Hanoverians, whose original settlement, according to the dynasty-name, was on the Thames! The historian who writes down the history of names instead of that of peoples, forgets that names, too, have their destinies. So also languages, which, with their migrations, modifications, victories, and defeats, are inconclusive even as to the existence of peoples associated with them. This is the basic error of Indo-Germanic research in particular. If in historic times the names “Pfalz” and “Calabria” have moved about, if Hebrew has been driven from Palestine to Warsaw, and Persian from the Tigris to India, what conclusions can be drawn from the history of the Etruscan name and the alleged “Tyrsenian” inscription at Lemnos?[221] Or did the French and the Haytian Negroes, as shown by their common language, once form a single primitive people? In the region between Budapest and Constantinople to-day two Mongolian, one Semitic, two Classical, and three Slavonic languages are spoken, and these speech-communities all feel themselves essentially as peoples.[222] If we were to build up a migration-story here, the error of the method would be manifested in some singular results. “Doric” is a dialect designation--that we know, and that is all we know. No doubt some few dialects of this group spread rapidly, but that is no proof of the spread or even of the existence of a human stock belonging with it.[223] II Thus we come to the pet idea of modern historical thought. If a historian meets a people that has achieved something, he feels that he owes it to these people to answer the question: Whence did it come? It is a matter of dignity for a people to have come from somewhere and to have an original home. The notion that it is at home in the place where we find it is almost an insulting assumption. Wandering is a cherished saga-motive of primitive mankind, but its employment in serious research also has become a sheer mania. _Whether_ the Chinese invaded China or the Egyptians Egypt no one inquires, the question being always _when_ and _whence_ they did so. It would be less of an effort to originate the Semites in Scandinavia or the Aryans in Canaan than to abandon the notion of an original home.