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Zeuss, the great authority on these matters, affirms broadly that no distinction in bodily feature is to be found between the Gauls, the Germans, and the Wends, so far as their characters are recorded by the old historians; and he proves his case by citations from a cloud of witnesses. The Baron de Belloguet remarks upon this passage:
Who does not feel what pleasure Zeuss brings us when he suggests that Gael, the name for the Irish Celt, and Scot, are at bottom the same word, both having their origin in a word meaning wind, and both signifying the violent stormy people?
The following paragraph from Prichard's Researches embodies some of the more general conclusions of ethnographers, especially of Zeuss, on whom Prichard, in common with Orelli and many other scholars, places great reliance.
This is a clear, scientific test to apply, and a test of which the accuracy can be verified; I do not say that Zeuss was the first person who knew this test or applied it, but I say that he is the first person who in dealing with Celtic matters has invariably proceeded by means of this and similar scientific tests; the first person, therefore, the body of whose work has a scientific, stable character; and so he stands as a model to all Celtic inquirers.
Poeta, which we find as early as Naevius, is Greek; and vates, which Zeuss traces to a Celtic root, meant originally "soothsayer," not "poet." Only in the Augustan period does it come into prominence as the nobler term, denoting that inspiration which is the gift of heaven and forms the peculiar privilege of genius.
His influence has already been most happy; and as I have enlarged on a certain failure in criticism of Eugene O'Curry's, whose business, after all, was the description and classification of materials rather than criticism, let me show, by another example from Eugene O'Curry, this good influence of Zeuss upon Celtic studies.
But the forms of its language are not our only key to a people; what it says in its language, its literature, is the great key, and we must get back to literature. The literature of the Celtic peoples has not yet had its Zeuss, and greatly it wants him.
Of this sort of thing Zeuss is incapable. The test which Zeuss used for establishing the age of these documents is a scientific test, the test of orthography and of declensional and syntactical forms. These matters are far out of my province, but what is clear, sound, and simple, has a natural attraction for us all, and one feels a pleasure in repeating it.
Zeuss and Grimm, with more probability, find in these names the roots of German words significant of honor and bravery, assumed by different tribes or confederacies as epithets or titles of distinction. Grimm identifies these three divisions with the Franks, Saxons, and Thuringians of a later age. See further, note chap. 27. Vocentur.
Those who would examine this subject more thoroughly, will consult Adelung, Zeuss, Grimm, Ritter, Ukert, Prichard, Latham, &c., who have written expressly on the geography or the ethnography of Germany. XXVIII. Summus auctorum, i.e. omnium scriptorum is, qui plurimum auctoritatis fideique habet. K. Cf. Sueton. Caes. 56.
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