Blair Collection > Vestigia celtica

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precious remains, not less time-worn and
weather-wasted on the stone than in sub-
stance blurred and obscured by the lin-
guistic change of sixteen centuries, are now
being patiently deciphered from the old
Gaulish inscriptions. And of what is thus
shown to belong to the whole Celtic family
much has been similarly proved to be in-
deed the common patrimony of the great
Aryan race. By a process seeming almost
to combine the delicate manipulation of the
picture-restorer with the keen disciplined
intuition and " scientific imagination " of the
practised palaeontologist, the student of
language has constructed, out of materials
largely Celtic, a great science of Word-
History, not unworthy to be compared
with that science which treats of the Life
of the Globe, extant and extinct, animal
and vegetable.
In this field of mere Word- History the
labours of the great workers on the Conti-
nent, who may be said to have first founded
a school of rational Celtic philology, and
the researches of their later and more