cans, Chamavi, Angrivarii and other
less important nations.

Their religious _cultus_, as far at least as the worship of _Mother
Earth_ in a Holy Island, was a link which connected the Angli with the
populations to the north rather than to the south of them; and--as far
as we may judge from the negative fact of finding no Angles in the great
confederacy that the energy of Arminius formed against the aggression of
Rome--their political relations did the same. But this is uncertain.

Such was the supposed area of the ancient Angles of Germany, and it
agrees so well with all the ethnological conditions of the populations
around, that it should not be objected to, or refined upon, on light
grounds. The two varieties of the German languages to which the
Anglo-Saxon bore the closest relationship, were the Old Saxon and the
Frisian, and each of these are made conterminous with it by the
recognition of the area in question--the Old Saxon to the south, the
Frisian to the west, and, probably, to the north as well. It is an area,
too, which is neither unnecessarily large, nor preposterously small; an
area which gives its occupants the navigable portions of two such rivers
as the Elbe and Weser; one which places them in the necessary relations
to their Holy Island (an island which, for the present we assume to be
Heligoland); and, lastly, one which without being exactly the nearest
part of the continent, fronts Britain, and is well situated for descents
upon the British coast.

During the third, fourth, and fifth centuries we hear nothing of the
Angli. They re-appear in the eighth. But then they are the Angles of
Beda, the Angles of Britain--not those of Germany--the Angles of a new
locality, and of a conquered country--not the parent stock on its
original continental home. Of these latter the history of Beda says but
little. Neither does the history of any other writer; indeed it is not
too much to say that they have no authentic, detailed, and consecutive
history at all, either early or late, either in the time of Beda when
the Angles of England are first described, or in the time of any
subsequent writer. There are reasons for this; as will be seen if we
look to their geographical position, and the relations between them and
the neighbouring populations. The Angles of Germany were too far north
to come in contact with the Romans. That we met with no Angli in the
great Arminian Confederacy has already been stated. When the Roma