The origin and the progress of nations, next after the school divinity
of the Middle Ages, has occasioned the most copious outpouring of
conjectural criticism. The simple mode of research suggested by the
works of Verstegan, Camden, and Spelman would, long before this time,
have made the early history of the British tribes as clear as it is now
obscure. Analogies in the primary sounds of each dialect; similarity or
difference in regard to objects of the first, or of a common necessity;
rules or laws for the succession of property, which are as various as
the tribes which overran the empire; the nature, agreement, or
dissimilarity in religious worship with those vestiges of its ritual and
celebration which, by the "pious frauds" and connivance of the early
church, still lurk in the pastimes of our rural districts:--the new
science of which we have spoken, by taking cognisance of these and all
other existing sources of legitimate investigation, will settle the
source and affinities of nations upon a plan as much superior to that of
Grotius and his school as fact and reason exceed the guess-work of the
theorist and the historian.
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