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ART. V.- Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, applied to Language and Religion. By CHEVALIER BUNSEN. London: Longmans. 1854.

IN a recent article on Mr. Dennis's Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria,' we engaged to revert to a special branch of Etruscan archæology-the national language, the only key to the origin of the race whenever Chevalier Bunsen's long-promised volumes should issue from the press. We cannot feel otherwise than disappointed that these learned and laborious researches have thrown no fuller and clearer light upon this mysterious enigma; a result, however, which ought to be attributed far more to the poverty of the materials to which the ethnological theory is applied, the paucity of monumental inscriptions, and the non-existence of any national literature,-than to defects inherent in the Chevalier's method of investigation. Before, however, we present to the reader the results of M. Bunsen's labours, it may be well to pass briefly in review the leading speculations which have been broached upon this perplexing question, since the study of Etruscan lore first arrested the attention of the antiquarian world. This we

owe in mere courtesy to our readers, since the value of the Chevalier's contributions can only be estimated by comparison with those of others, with whose researches, in so abstruse a province of classical learning, the generality of our readers can hardly be expected to be very familiar.

One of the earliest theories, which found especial favour among the ultramontane learned, assumed the Etruscans to be originally a Transalpine race, who, descending as conquerors into the plains of the Po, had gradually pushed their settlements in a southerly direction. The idea was not destitute of ancient authority and classical countenance; it was supported by the recorded fact, that there really were, at a later period, in the Rhætian Alps, tribes speaking the Etruscan dialect. The term Rasena was brought into connexion with Rhætian,' and the Celtic and Teutonic dialects were held, for the moment, safer guides than the Egyptian or the Hebrew. The theory, however, though afterwards renewed with more success by Niebuhr and his school, did not at the time attract numerous adherents; it was succeeded, in the then prevailing rage for Oriental etymology, by the Phoenico-Egyptian delusion, which, at first, won popular opinion, though its futilities ere long caused it to be hissed off the historical arena, with much justice, as its own

authors candidly confessed. The classical theory of interpretation now became the favourite. Antecedent probability, in the absence of any positive evidence, countenanced the connexion of a primitive people of Italy with the Latins and Greeks, rather than with Arabs and Egyptians. The mischievous plausibilities of Lanzi, the pillar of this system, long proved a serious impediment to the progress of sound inquiry. He neglected the distinction between the Etruscan inscriptions proper, and those of the various conterminous tribes, Umbrians, Oscans, &c., which doubtless contain an admixture of Greek and Latin elements never hitherto discoverable in the Etruscan tongue. Various etymological expedients (lucus a non lucendo) were invoked in aid of this fallacious system; transposition, substitution, intercalation of grammatical forms, were all enlisted, and exhausted in the process. Hupitaiseke becomes, in his arbitrary vocabulary, VTоTÉOELKE, monumentum posuit: Turke is discovered to be δώρευκε (δεδώρευκε): Tular is merely the Etruscan form of To oλλápiov: not to fatigue the reader with other illustrations, deservedly ridiculed by a clever contemporary some ten years ago, who remarked that 'here lieth' would give equally good Greek for ἱερὸς λίθος: “ this stone' for δύστονος, &c.

The proverbial prejudices of the Italian literati soon afterwards found an eloquent advocate in Micali, who rallied all the learning of his time in support of the opinion of Dionysius, that the Etruscans were an indigenous Italian race. This doctrine was shortly afterwards attacked by Niebuhr, who recurred to the Rhætian theory of Frèret, believing the Etruscans to have been a tribe from the Rhætian Alps, who conquered the Tyrrhene Pelasgi, the earlier possessors of the land. He defended his own version of their origin by the resemblance-a resemblance, we need hardly say, palpable only to the second-sight of etymologists of the name Rasena,' which the Etruscans used to designate themselves, to 'Rhæti;' by the statements of the ancients, that the Rhætians were of Etruscan extraction; by the analogy which certain dialects now spoken in those regions bear to the Etruscan; and also by the fact that no earlier population than the Etruscan is recorded to have inhabited those mountains. The fact, however, that ancient monuments resembling the Etruscan, and inscriptions in a character very similar, have been found among the Rætian and Novic Alps, though it may in a great degree authenticate the connexion of Etruria with those regions, can only support the theory of the original extraction of the people thence, at the expense of the Roman authorities of Livy, Justin, and Pliny, who concurrently declare the Etruscan emigration to have been from the south in a northerly direction. A modification of Niebuhr's view was

held by Ottfried Müller,-that the later element in the Etruscan nation was derived from Lydia, yet composed not of natives, but of Tyrrhene Pelasgi, who had settled on the coasts of Asia Minor; and that the earlier lords of the land were the Rasena, from the mountains of Rhætia, who, driving back the Umbrians, and uniting with the Tyrrheni on the Tarquinian coast, constituted the Etruscan race.

The next champion who appeared on the lists of the archæological arena was Sir W. Betham, the late Ulster King-atarms, whose Quixotic caprices may possibly be more amusing to the reader than the dry and barren details we have hitherto been forced to record. He broached the extraordinary theory, that the Etruscans, the Phoenicians, and the old Milesians of Erin were the same people, speaking identically the same Erse; that Etruria was colonized from the east, then Ireland from Etruria. He endeavoured, by the most ludicrous devices, to substantiate this system by an analysis of the Eugubian tables, and the great Etruscan inscription of Perugia. By appeals to archaic glossaries and obsolete dialects, by capricious divisions of words and syllables, and other expedients of a despairing invention, he elicited from an examination of the first of these documents the valuable discovery that it contained, in old Erse, an account of the colonization of Ireland, with a log-book of the voyage which led to the event. The commencement of the second Eugubian table may serve as a specimen of his method: No. I. is the text according to its own subdivision of words; No. II. is Sir William's Hiberno-Punic edition; Nos. III. and IV. are his two English versions:

'I. BUKUKUM: IUBIU: PUNE: UBEF: FURFATH: TREF: BITLUF: TURUF: MARTE: THURIE: FETU: PUPLUPER: TUTAS: IIUBINAS &c.

II. Bu co com iud be i u Pune u be fa for fath tre fa bi at lu fa tur u fa mar ta tur i e fad

u pob lu bar to ta is i iud be i na is &c.

III. Was which security day and night in from Phoenician from night means defence by skill throughout the means being also water means voyage from the means as indeed the voyage in it far away people water of the sea is gentle indeed it is by wisdom day and night in it is &c.

IV. There was security, day and night, during the whole voyage to and from the river, Phoenician, from the night precautions and skill, and there being deep water in the river. By this skill in distant voyages of the people of the water to the north, is the sea indeed practicable; secure by day and night, gentle, indeed, in the sea, it is, &c.'

A clever contributor to the Quarterly Review undertook to extract out of these inscriptions, through the medium of any real language of Europe, living or dead, better sense than Sir

William elicited from his imaginary Hiberno-Phoenician,-nay, real sense, for in the jargon quoted above there is obviously no sense at all. In submitting the following sample of what might be done for the Teutonic family, he assumed only, with more modesty than Sir William, that the Eugubian tables are written in a primitive, but still intelligible, Anglo-Saxon dialect; and that the second table contains, not a log-book of voyages to Erin, but a commercial treaty between the Etruscans and the Phoenicians; one written in current grammatical 6 sense, without Ulsterian transpositions, and with vastly less than Ulsterian corruption of the original Umbrian text:'

'Bi ok u kum iu bi o Pune o bef for fat drov bi tal of Tur of Mart Ethruria fed o pupl u pa her tute as iu bi in as &c.

By oak you come, you buy, O Phoenician, o' beef, four fat drove, by tale of Tyre, of the Mart of Etruria; feed, O people! you pay her duty, as you buy, in asses, &c.'

In "oak," for oaken ship, the correspondence with the Latin terms, abies, trabs, and the modern Italian legno, is remarkable; both probably traceable to the same Etruscan usage. The "tale" (perhaps toll?) of Tyre, specifies doubtless the number of oxen in each drove contracted for, according to some conventional Phoenician standard. The apostrophe, "feed O people," is fine sample of the combination of the poetical with the prac tical, common in such documents among a primitive race. The as, we need scarcely add, was the current Etruscan coin. The commencement of the first table reads equally well. It specifies the different prices or duties of

corn:

"Punic corn is paid, o' rye, at a higher, yea a bye code; no reclaim (drawback?) &c."'

We shall close our list with Mrs. Hamilton Gray, who, unhappily for her literary fame, imbibed all the prejudices of the old Egyptian school. She assumed Etruscan emigration from a certain Mesopotamian city, whose Scriptural name was Resen, and whose Egyptian title she conveniently supposes to have been Ludim. Hence, of course, their designations, Rasena and Lydian. From Resen she transports them to Egypt, whence they are expelled by the native powers, and accordingly cross to the Italian coast. Had she but made them,' says the reviewer alluded to above, 'on traversing the Mediterranean, land first in Gaul, and cross the Rhætian Alps into Lombardy, 'she would have had the merit of blending the Phoenician, Egyptian, Lydian, Libyan, and Celtic systems into one.' Having, in a recent article upon Mr. Dennis's work, adverted in some detail to that exploded superstition, the Egypto-Oriental mania, we are sure our readers will readily dispense with any refutation of Mrs. H. Gray's theory here; the more, as its features present scarcely any variation from those in which it has long been familiar to the public in the pages of the Universal History.

We have no intention of plunging our readers into M. Bunsen's voluminous researches, further than is necessary to reflect the few additional rays of light which they cast upon the problem before us. Before, however, the Chevalier records the latest results of comparative philology, in reference to the Etruscan enigma, there are several interesting pages, in which he traces the gradual development of the philosophy of language from the earliest era of critical inquiry; the contents of which, especially as they bear closely upon the subject at issue, will probably be acceptable to many of our readers.

In laying them before the public, we must revert to the old style of reviewing that of citation at length-in the assurance that it would be impossible to condense them with effect. An outline of the history of philological science from the era of Pythagoras and Plato to that of Leibnitz, the author of the Comparative Philosophy of Language,' and the first successful classifier of the languages then known, is given in the following

The profound passage in Genesis (ii. 19), "And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam, to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof," finds its philosophical echo in Pythagoras. Jamblichus and Proclus report the following as one of his sayings: Having been asked What was the wisest among things? he answered, " Number;" and, What next in wisdom? "The Name-giver." This is explained by the account preserved in Clemens of Alexandria (Ecl. Proph. i. 32), that Pythagoras thought of all wise men he was not only the most rational, but also the most ancient, who gave the names to things. Pythagoras, as well as the Bible, supposes man to have formed language, and both consider this act as primitive, and analogous to that of the Divine mind, by which there is order and measure in the universe. With Heraclitus, "the dark," and Democritus, his contemporary, begins the antagonism which pervades the whole Greek and Latin philosophy of language. Heraclitus considered the words of language as the shadow of bodies, or the image reflected in the mirror-types of objective reality; whereas the other school saw in them products of convention. According to one, language existed by nature (objectively); according to the other, by a positive arbitrary act of man (subjectively). The first were, according to another term, analogists; the others, anomalists. Plato, in his "Cratylus," and Aristotle in his "Organon," may be said, however, to be the men who, upon the traces of their predecessors, have laid the foundations of the philosophy of language. Plato, following Pythagoras and Socrates, is an analogist; Aristotle tends to anomalism; but as Plato acknowledges the positive or conventional element, so Aristotle does not deny the objectivity which lies at the bottom of language. He is startled by the fact that the languages of men are so many and so different, and, therefore, places the conventional element first; but, as he expressly says (De Animá, c. i) that the sounds of the voice are symbolical of the affections of the soul, we must not interpret this only of the interjectional sounds, but also of the words expressing things and thought, or real language. The speculations of Plato, when rightly understood, bear upon the highest problems of the philosophy of language; the categories and defini