MIGRATIONS OF RACES OF MEN CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY. 581 



any distinct and jx'rnianent settlement. A vast nniltitnde of Huns 

 ranged across Central Europe, carrying- destrnction as far as the Seine. 

 ^'arious Slavonic tribes occiii)ied the countries along the Danube and 

 the east coast of the Adriatic; they even tilled the isles lying- off the 

 Dalmatian coast (where only Slavonic is now spoken), and descended 

 into (h'eece, in the modern population of wliich they form a large ele- 

 ment. Tlie Bulgarians, a Finnish people from the Volga, settled among 

 the Danubian Slavs and adopted their language, while the Avars, 

 penetrating farther west, held the great Hungarian plain for two cen- 

 turies. Last of all, at the end of the ninth century, came the Magyars, 

 another Finnish tribe, who retained tlieir old language and have played 

 a brilliant part in history. A century before they entered Hungary, 

 the Norsemen and Danes had begun those piratical expeditions which 

 ultimately turned into migrations, largely changing the i)0])ulation of 

 eastern Britain and of northern France. At one moment the North- 

 men of Iceland seemed on the point of spreading from their settlement 

 on the coast of Bast Greenland into North America, where they made 

 descents at points the most southern of which have been plausibly 

 conjectured to lie in Massachusetts or Long Island. These expeditions 

 met with so much resistance from the natives that the idea of perma- 

 nent settlement, apparently for a time entertained, was abandoned. 

 The Norsemen had not, lilce the Spaniards five centuries later, and the 

 I^vnglish of the seventeenth century, the advantage of firearms, and 

 tliey came from a very small nation, which could not afford to waste 

 its men; so this case has to be added to that list of attempted coloniza- 

 tions which might, like the settlement of the Phocteans in Corsica and 

 the Huguenots in Brazil, have changed the course of liistory had tliey 

 but prospered. These seven centuries of unrest left no i)opulatioii in 

 Europe unchanged, and gave birth not only to the states and nations 

 of the middle ages and the modern world, but to modern civilization as 

 a whole, creating new tongues and new types of culture from the mix- 

 ture of the intruding races with the provincial subjects of Rome. 



The tburth grou]> of migrations overlaps in time that wliich we have 

 Jnst been considering, and in three countries overlaps it also in space — 

 viz, in North Africa, in Spain, and in tlie Thraco-Danubian lands. 

 But its origin was wholly distinct and its character different. It begins 

 with the outbreak of the Arabs from their remote peninsula imme- 

 diately after the death of Mohannned — we may date it from the first 

 defeats of the Romans in Syria in A. D. 632, and of the Persian in A. D. 

 (hio — and it did not quite end till the cession of Podolia to the Turks, 

 ten centuries later, in A. D. 1()9.5. It changed the face of Western and 

 Southern Asia, as the Volkerwanderung changed that of Europe, yet 

 it involved far less transfer of population, and worked more by way of 

 })ermeative conquest than of migration pro])er. The Arabs spread 

 over Irak, Egypt, Syria, North Africa, Sicily, and the Iberian penin- 

 sula; twice they laid their grasp on the southeastern corners of Gaul. 



