Now, whoever admits the validity of the valuable philological researches of those scholars, who, by showing the extent to which languages apparently as different as the German, the Greek, the Latin, the Lithuanian, or the Russian, are essentially cognate, have reduced the leading tongues of Europe to a single great class, falling, after the manner of the classes in zoology and botany, into definite divisions and subdivisions--a class which, though somewhat inconveniently denominated Indo-European, is still, as far as it goes, a true and natural group--must see the necessity of bringing the languages thus allied into as close geographical contact as possible; since the divisions to which they, respectively, belong, are the two most allied members of the class in question. For that the Sarmatian and classical tongues are nearer each other than the classical and German, the classical and Keltic, notwithstanding the opinions of several eminent scholars to the contrary, is a safe assertion; perhaps it is also the preponderating opinion. To connect, therefore, the areas where languages thus allied are spoken, by areas belonging to transitional and intermediate populations is an ethnological necessity; and, however much subsequent changes may have obliterated such areas of connexion, however early those changes may have occurred; however complete they may have been; and however much they may have been followed up by others, the original continuity must, _at one time or other, earlier or later_, have had an existence. Unless we admit this, we must suppose that similar names for similar objects, and similar inflections for similar moods, tenses, and cases, have been developed independently of community of origin; a doctrine upheld by few, and one which would require the most transcendental philology to support it; a doctrine which, without condemning as unreasonable, we may fairly say has never much influenced the current doctrine of ethnologists. Admitting it, however, we must recognise a long series of difficult problems; problems that have so rarely been dealt with as to be considered wholly new and foreign; problems that occur whenever two allied tongues are separated from each other by any form of speech _other than intermediate_. The languages thus related may be ever so like, or ever so unlike; but as long as they are liker to each other than those which intervene, the problem in question will recur, _viz._, the reconstruction of the state of things that existed before the original separation, and which is implied by the existing points of similarity. It occurs in Great Britain. No matter how unlike the Scotch Gaelic and the Welsh may be, they are more like than the English that lies between them. It occurs, as will soon be seen, in the ethnology of Greece.