A comparative depreciation of subsidiary details appears in the present question; wherein it is held that certain members of the Lithuanian family extended their area across the Baltic into parts of Scandinavia, and peopled the southern provinces of Sweden. These were the Goths of Gothland, the Jutes of Jutland, the Vites of Withesleth, the old name of the Danish islands, anterior to their occupation by the Danes. The critic who doubts whether the names are the same as that of the Goths, on the strength of the difference of form, is free to do so; but by doing so, he will only impugn a part of the present doctrine. That the Goths of Gothland are the Gothones, Guttones, or Gythini of the opposite coast of Prussia and Courland is the important inference; and that the appearance of identical or similar names on the opposite coasts of an inland sea of no considerable breadth is a phenomenon which, until it can be explained otherwise, must be presumed to denote ethnological affinity is the principle which supports it. Whether the Gothones of Courland were really and truly Lithuanian is a point upon which there may be a difference of opinion; but there should be no difference of opinion as to the explanation of the presence of Goths in the opposite country of Gothland. The common-sense view of the matter, and the ordinary habits of interpretation should take their course. This may be admitted, and yet an objection be taken to the effect that the _Goths_ of the southern _Gothland_ (the _Goth_-ones, _Gyth_-ini, _Gutt_-ones) were not Lithuanic but German. The primary argument on this point lies in the undoubted fact of the Goths of the Lower Danube, in the third and fourth centuries, being German. But this primary argument is considerably invalidated by the fact, too often overlooked, of those Germans having been known under the name of _Goths_ only when they have settled in the country of the _Getæ_ and _Gaudæ_, a fact which makes the name just as foreign to the Teutonic dialects as _Briton_ was to the Anglo-Saxon. From which it follows that all other populations which were, in respect to their _name_, in the same predicament as the Goths of Alaric and Theodoric, were connected not with the German invaders, but with the occupants of the country invaded; just as the Bretons of Brittany are connected not with such Englishmen as call themselves patriotically and poetically “Britons,” but with the Welsh representatives of the original occupants of the Keltic island _Britannia_. Now the populations thus linked together by some such name as _G-th_, _G-t_, _J-t_,[21] and _V-t_ (all of which have been admitted to be but different forms of the same word) are numerous; three of them being now before us. The real Goths, like the real Britons, were something very different from their German conquerors.