232 Darwinism and Other Essays. 



country then known as Dacia, formed a perma- 

 nent settlement there. In 271 the Emperor Au- 

 relian, 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 northeast. 

 The Latin language was firmly established over 

 this territory, and is spoken to-day, in a modern- 

 ized form, by six millions of " Ruinans " in Wal- 

 lachia, 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 phys- 

 ical 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 inter- 



