Both German and Latin,' says Jäkel, are poor in participles: what they have, however, are easily explained. The participle, for instance, which appears in German as end, in Gothic as ands,' (in Scottish and, and in English ing), 'is in Latin ens or ent: they all mean that which is, a thing (in German wesen is thing), and are clearly derived from the verb we have been inspecting. It is obvious that the oldest and purest form is that retained in the German. The flexions also were similar: It is strange, but true, that some of the most striking coincidences are between the Latin and the Teutonic dialects of Scandinavia and Friezeland,-regions which Roman foot never touched. Some of these have already been noticed-here are a few more of the Scandinavian ones: abstergo, affstryka, abstraho, affdruga, carus, kaer, candela, kindel, clivus, kleif (cliff), &c.-in all these cases the word has disappeared, or at least become unusual, in the German. In Friezeland hospes is osb, macula, magl, rete is rhwyd, turtur is turtur, &c. In the Franconian dialect aptus is haft, pagus, bach, pauci, fohe (Eng. few), equus, hoiz, nepos, nevo. Ver (spring) appears only in the Swedish vaar. M. Jäkel produces many more examples of this class; but there can be no doubt that the most striking feature in his book is the accumulation of instances where, while the Latin has one insulated word from a particular root, the English, perhaps, another, the Swedish a third, and so on-the whole family appear in their natural fulness and connexion in the High German alone. The Romans had ventus and we have wind (each with dependent participials), but 2A2 the the Germans have the verb wehen (pronounced vehen), to blow, whose participle wehend gives in contraction vind, wind, and ventus, and a sequela, enough to fill pages in a dictionary, of words derived, not from the participle alone, but from other parts of the verb as well. The historical dissertation appended to the philological essay of Jäkel would lead us into a world-wide field. The author combats, with great ingenuity, some of Niebuhr's notions as to the origin of the various Italian tribes who were ultimately merged in the Roman state: one, at least, of these he considers to have been of Sclavonic race; more than one of Celtic; but the far greater part of them, including the most important, pure Goths. The use he makes of the spelling of names in old inscriptions is particularly curious. Thus, for Euganei he finds on an antique vase ausuganei, and interprets it ausgänger, the outgoers (Scottish, outgangers), the people of emigrants.' He claims kindred for the modern Baiern' (Bavarians) with the Boii-and interprets the young men the boys.' The Volsci are the folk-the people xar' esoxnv. But the Etruscans occupy much more space than any of these.; all the names by which they were known are, he says, purely Gothic. The name by which they generally called themselves was Rasena: Livy (Book v. 33) tells us that the Ræti, an Alpine people, were, 'haud dubie,' of the same origin, and spoke the same tongue in a ruder form. Jäkel has no doubt, then, that the Rasena and the Ræti were originally branches of the same people, distinguished by the same name; and he finds their primeval seat in that great district of Germany which bore the name of Ratia-that is, the country of hills, the raised land. Tyrrheni, he proceeds, must have been a later appellation-it signifies the tower-men, the dwellers in fortified places. As for Tusci, that is nothing but a slight disguise of Teutsche (Teutonici): when Tacitus names the founder of the German race as Tuisco, he betrays exactly the same fashion of eliding the consonants. The names of the gods, borrowed by Rome from Etruria, confirm, he thinks, the same view: Neptunus being naff, lord, and tunn, water; Minerva, a compound of man (qu. maiden ?) and arf, arrow; Mars, from mar, fame; (qu. Mavors-Germ: machtig fürst, i. e. great prince, answering to the Hindoo Maha-Rajah ?): Nortia, the Etruscan Fortuna, identical with the Norne of the Scandinavians, &c. Many other Etruscan vocables are traced to the same source: Aruns is Ernst, the serious, the Earnest, i. e. the brave, the determined; Felsina is the town built on the rocks (felsen, German): this was the Etruscan name for the city at the foot of the the Apennines, of which the Boii afterwards made their capital, and to which they gave their own name-Bononia-now Bologna. Other Etrurian towns were Cosa or Cossa, identical with haus, dwelling-place; Comum (Como), with heim, German, our home, ham, hamlet, &c.; Puteoli, the town of excavations, pits, wells. The river Auser is the German Wasser (water); Statonia is stadt (German for town); and the Armenia (supposed to be the Fiore near Montalto) is the river flowing in the country of the Hermans -the war men. In the Oscic, rocks were called herna: in some of the Swiss dialects fern still means rock-in others horn; as the Schreckhorn (the terrible rock), the Finster-horn (the dark rock), &c. Petorritum meant a four-wheeled carriage-from the Oscic petor (four), identical with the old German fedwor, and rit, old German for wheel (the modern rad). The Oscic termination was usually in or and ur (as Tyrrenor, Latinur)—this is the German er. Latium is the flat country, according to Jäkel, and the Romani were the men of ruhm, i. e., in almost all the German dialects, fame. On an Etruscan monument, still visible, we have Ruemunes for Romani. We must leave untouched the professor's Teutonic interpretations of the names of the elder institutions, and magistrates, and ceremonies of Rome. We have done enough to direct the atten→ tion of those who have really a taste for such studies to his treatise, and we hope furnished the general reader with a little amusement and food for speculation. ART. III.-1. Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Committee of the House of Lords, appointed to consider the Poor Laws. 1831. 2. Extracts of Letters from Poor Persons who emigrated last Year to Canada and the United States. London. 1831. 3. The Results of Machinery. Printed under the Superintendence of the Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge. 1831. F all themes for the meditation of the philosophical statesman, of all topics which can engage the attention of any reasoning being, the most attractive and deeply interesting beyond comparison, if he possess but the common sympathies of humanity, is the study of the means of ameliorating the condition of the great body of his fellow-men; who, under the existing circumstances of most human societies, lead a life of unceasing toil, rarely remunerated by a sufficiency even of necessaries, and often depressed to unalloyed misery. There are some persons persons who conceive this to be the inevitable lot of the bulk of society. In their opinion the labouring classes are necessarily condemned, not merely to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, but to earn a very scanty supply of it by the severest exertions and any expectation of being able to elevate the labourer above this dreary level, is, with them, unreasonable and Quixotic, a rebellion against one of the fixed laws of nature, or rather of nature's great Author, whom they consider to have irremediably prescribed this unhappy state of things. 'Bond damns the poor, and leaves them to the Lord.' We own ourselves of a very different opinion. So gloomy and hope-forbidding a creed is as irreconcilable with our firm conviction of man's capacity for moral, intellectual, and social improvement, as it is repugnant to our notions of the expansive benevolence of his Creator. That the mass of mankind should ever be able to live without labour, is not only not to be expected, but not to be desired. If this were a possible, it would, perhaps, be the worst of all possible contingencies. The man who has no other object in life but to enjoy himself, is rarely any other than a self-tormenting being; and were this same far niente' ever to become the universal occupation, the evil passions of our nature would probably be developed to a degree which would realize hell upon earth. The true Pandemonium we conceive to be a society of idle and well-fed persons, who tear each other to pieces for want of anything else to do. But though labour will doubtless always continue to be the condition of human existence, and of human enjoyment also, that the quantity of labour necessary to procure for each individual the means of subsistence should indefinitely diminish, and that the quantity, not of necessaries merely, but of other useful and agreeable objects likewise, procurable by the labour of each individual, should in the same ratio increase, with the advance of knowledge and civilization, seems to us not merely a defensible proposition, but a self-evident truth. Whilst, as in the state of barbarism, man has nothing but his natural resources to depend on, his existence is necessarily precarious; hunger and misery his occasional, perhaps frequent, visiters. But every step that he makes in knowledge and art, in the improvement of his faculties and the enlargement of his resources, ought to remove him farther and farther from the reach of want. And it would be strange, indeed, if after ages spent in successive victories over matter, and in accumulating the means of yet further conquestsafter he has not only compelled whole races of the inferior animals to his service, but succeeded in tasking the very elements to do his bidding with superior docility and far less superintendence when when inventions after inventions, one more perfect than the other, have multiplied his powers of production in every branch of industry to a considerable, and in some to an almost incalculable extent, it would be indeed strange if, in spite of all this, he were still unable to escape the grasp of want, still incapacitated from procuring for the larger proportion of his numbers a full sufficiency even of the lowest necessaries on which to maintain life. If such should indeed be the condition of the population of any country which has made a considerable progress in the arts of production, the simplest reflection will force upon us the conviction that gross mismanagement must prevail either in the direction of its resources or the distribution of its produce. Perhaps the trite but shallow fallacy will here be objected, that the evil is owing to the increase of numbers outstripping toat of the resources for employing and maintaining them. This, however, often as the assertion is repeated with an air of oracular wisdom, is, in a general sense, impossible. The effect of every improvement in the arts of production is to increase the aggregate means of mankind in proportion to their numbers-to increase the average means of every individual man, how many, or how few soever, there may be. To give, therefore, his more or less rapid increase as a reason why the enlarged resources of man have not proportionately improved his condition, is tantamount to declaring, that in a sum of simple multiplication, the increased power of the multiplier has a tendency to diminish the product. There is, indeed, one circumstance, which, if it had any existence, might account for this anomaly-a deficiency of the natural agents upon which the labour of man is exercised in the gratification of his desires. But are the elements less favourable than heretofore? Is the earth less fruitful? The bright sun less vivifying? Are the seasons more inclement? The genial rains less refreshing? Has the water lost its power of supporting our vessels, or the air of impelling them over its surface? Does fire no longer give forth its usual heat, or are our stores of fuel exhausted? Are the powers of nature, in short, undergoing decay, or is she becoming a niggard of her bounties? On the contrary, every day we are discovering fresh and undreamt of treasures in her yet unexplored recesses. Every hour opens to us new views of her inexhaustible and infinite capacity-new qualities in matter applicable to some purposes of utility. Or is there a deficiency of elbow-room for the increasing numbers of mankind? However we may jostle each other in the Strand or the Toledo, there is clearly space enough and to spare on the pampas and the prairies, in the wilds of Siberia and the deserts-which once were gardens-of Barbary. China of late was believed to be over-peopled to such a degree, in spite of the 'check |