So serious, then, are the difficulties involved in the notion of either a continuous Helleno-Italian population originally extended from Greece to Italy but subsequently displaced, or an isolated intermediate locality from which both Hellenes and Italians were given-off as colonies, that I would rather believe that the likeness between the Greek and Latin languages proved nothing more than is proved by the presence of Norman-French words in English (viz., simple intermixture and intercourse) than admit it. I do not ask the reader to go thus far. I only request him to compare the size of the Greek and Italian areas with the size of the parts between them, which are neither one nor the other. This will lead him to the threshold of the difficulties involved in the usual views as to the _origin of the Hellenic population within Hellas itself_; and, provided that he be willing to examine patiently rather than reject hastily, an apparent paradox, it will also prepare him for a train of reasoning of which the result will be a Greece, or Hellas, as different from the Greece or Hellas of the current historians, as England is different from Britain. By which I mean that, if, by the term _Greece_ we denote the present kingdom of King Otho, irrespective of its population, and with a view only to the portion of the earth’s surface that it constitutes, the Hellenes will come out Greek, just as the Anglo-Saxons are British, _i.e._, not at all. Instead of this, the true and primitive Greeks will be the analogues of the now extinct or modified Britons of Kent and Northumberland, the Hellenes being those of the Angle, Frisian, and other Germanic conquerors of our island. But to catch it in its full clearness, the point of view from which the physical history of the Hellenes is to be contemplated, the critic should go somewhat further than this, and attempt his own reconstruction of the state of those European populations which existed when the Greek and Latin languages, with their several points of likeness and difference, were first developed. Let him try to do this by assuming that the necessary movements and displacements were made by _land_, and he will find that it must be by ringing changes upon such suppositions as the following-- 1. Occupancy of Greece from Italy. 2. Occupancy of Italy from Greece. 3. Extension into Greece, on one side, or-- 4. Into Italy, on one side, or-- 5. Into both Greece and Italy--from some common point different from each. 6. Absolute continuity of a Helleno-Latin population from Calabria to the Morea. In each of the first two alternatives there is the displacement of some population earlier than the one--Greek or Italian, as the case may be--which we supposed to have been immigrant. In the three next there is the same; with the additional difficulty of fixing the point from which the migrations diverged.