XL] THE RACES OF THE DANUBE. 217 



finding the province difficult to defend, surrendered 

 it to the Goths, in whose hands it remained for a long 

 time a bulwark against the incursions of wild tribes 

 from the north-east. The Latin language was firmly 

 established over this territory, and is spoken to-day, 

 in a modernised form, by six millions of " Rumans " 

 in Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania. Of this 

 population, the Transylvanian Rumans have long 

 formed part of the kingdom of Hungary ; the rest, 

 under the nominal suzerainty of the Porte, are ruled 

 by a German prince of the house of Hohenzollern ; 

 and the racial basis of the whole is, no doubt, mainly 

 Teutonic, with a considerable Roman and still greater 

 Slavic admixture. 



The Slavs make up the third and last division of 

 the Aryan conquerors of Europe. Their speech has 

 in many respects departed less widely from the forms 

 of the common Aryan mother-tongue than the speech 

 of the earlier invaders. In physical characteristics 

 they resemble most closely the Northern Germans, 

 in whom, with the central Russians and Letts, we see 

 perhaps the purest specimens of the Aryan race ; but 

 in the south they have been more or less modified by 

 intermixture with various strains of Tataric blood. 

 Napoleon's witticism, however, that you need only 

 scratch a Russian to get at the Tatar underneath, 



