632 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



teenth century is not wanting. The truth seems to be that two forces 

 were contending for the control of eastern Europe. The Latin could 

 prevail only in those regions which were beyond the potent influence 

 of Greece. Dacia being remote and barbarian, this Latin element 

 had a fighting chance for survival, and succeeded. 



Our ethnic map at page 614 shows a curious islet of Roumanian 

 language in the heart of the Greek-speaking territory of Thessaly. 

 There is little sympathy between the two peoples, according to Hel- 

 lene. The occurrence of this Roumanian colony, so far removed 

 from its base, has long puzzled ethnographers. Some believe the 

 peoples were separately Romanized in situ; others that they were 

 colonists from Dacia in the ninth and tenth centuries. At all events, 

 these Pindus Roumanians are too numerous — over a million souls — 

 to be neglected in any theory as to the origin of their language.* An- 

 other islet of quasi-Roumanian speech occurs in Istria, on the Adriatic 

 coast. Its origin is equally obscure. f 



It is no contradiction that, in spite of the fact of our exclusion 

 of Roumania from the Balkan Peninsula owing to its Latin affinities, 

 thereby seeming to differentiate it sharply from Bulgaria, the latter 

 of Finnic origin; that we now proceed to treat of the physical char- 

 acteristics of the two nationalities, Roumanian and Bulgarian, to- 

 gether. Here is another example of the superficiality of language, 

 of social and political institutions. They do not concern the funda- 

 mental physical facts of race in the least. At the same time we again 

 emphasize the necessity of a powerful corrective, based upon purely 

 natural phenomena, for the tendency of philologists and ethnog- 

 raphers to follow their pet theories far afield, giving precedence to 

 analogies of language and customs over all the potent facts of geo- 

 graphical probability. Let us look at it in this light. Is there any 

 chance that, on the opposite sides of the Danube, a few Finns and a 

 few Romans respectively interposed among the dense population 

 which so fertile an area must have possessed, even at an early time, 

 could be in any wise competent to make different types of the two? 

 There is nothing in our confessedly scanty anthropological data to 

 show it, at all events. We must treat the lower Danubian plain as 

 a unit, irrespective of the bounds of language, religion, or nationality. 



It was long believed that the Bulgarians were distinctive among 

 the other peoples of eastern Europe by reason of their long-headed- 

 ness. All the investigations upon limited series of crania pointed in 

 that direction. This naturally was interpreted as a confirmation of the 

 historic data as to a Finnic Bulgarian origin very distinct from that 

 of the broad-headed SlaA^s. Several recent discoveries have put a 

 new face upon the matter. In the first place, researches by Dr. Bassa- 



* Picot, 1875, pp. 390 et seq. \ Auerbach, 1898, p. 211. 



