subject." Since that time the question has indeed been treated by many learned authorities, and, in the last few years, since the modern development of the so-called principle of nationalities, with all the passion and acerbity belonging to political discussions; yet in the main the results have been so contradictory that the question has lost but little of the obscurity which attached to it in the days of the Byzantine chronicler.

The

It was not till the latter part of the last century that the question attracted attention in Europe. The first effort to elucidate it was made by Dr Thunmann, a Professor at the University of Halle, in an essay "On the History and Language of the Albanians and Wallachs." materials for this work appear to have been supplied to him by a young Macedonian from Mosehopolis, who proceeded to Halle to complete his studies; and besides presenting the Professor with a small lexicon of the MacedoWallach and Albanian languages, which had been published at Venice in 1770 by the Prototope of his native town, was able to furnish him with much practical information concern

ing the habits and whereabouts of those hitherto almost unknown races. With regard to the Wallachs south of the Danube, Thunmann arrived at the conclusion that they represented the remnants of the ancient Thracians, who, after being Romanised by intermingling with the Roman colonists and adopting the Roman tongue, were destroyed out of the town and plains by the successive barbarian invasions, and compelled to seek refuge in the mountainous regions of the Peninsula, the Balkans, the Rhodope, Mount Olympus, and the Pindus, where they maintained a wild and nomadic existence, surrounded on all sides by the new-comers, Slavs, Petcheneques, and Greeks. They were thus closely related to the Roumanians north of the Danube, who had also sprung from the intermingling of the Roman colonists with the old Thracian populations known under the name of Dacians and Getes, and who were also forced by the barbarians to fly to the mountains in order to escape destruction; while many of them, emigrating westwards, occupied Siebenbürgen, and all that part of Hungary lying north of the Danube, of which the

Hungarians afterwards slowly dispossessed them.

This theory was not slow in eliciting countertheories; and already, in 1781, Sulzer published his History of Transalpine Dacia, in which he sought to refute the notion that any large body of descendants from the Roman colonists of Dacia could have survived the barbarian invasions north of the Danube; and as he failed to find any traces of the existence of any such nation up to the eleventh century, he ascribes their appearance after that date to emigrations. from the Balkan peninsula, whence they brought with them to Catholic Hungary and Saxony not only the Roman tongue, but also the orthodox faith of their Macedonian brothers. This theory was further supported by Engel in his 'Commentatio de expeditionibus Trajani ad Danubium,' who accounts for the reappearance of the Roman tongue in Wallachia and Siebenbürgen by the drafts of Wallach colonists whom Krumus, a Bulgarian king, who ruled in those regions, brought back with him in 814 from a victorious expedition south of the Danube.

In more recent years this theory has been

questioned by Thomaschek, who does not consider the identity of language between the Wallachs of Central Thrace and the Roumanians north of the Danube sufficiently conclusive of an identical origin, arguing that the same Romanising influences working on kindred races, however territorially removed from each other, must produce cognate results upon their language and customs. But in Rösler's 'Romänische Studien,' the theory of the migration of the Roumanians found its fullest development. Dismissing contemptuously all the old arguments in support of the presence of a Romanic element north of the Danube before the thirteenth century, he peoples the Balkan peninsula up to that date with the Romanised descendants of the early Thracian population, claims for them a large share in the revival of the second Bulgarian kingdom, and then takes hold of the Mongol and Turkish invasions to make them migrate in a body to the northern banks of the Danube.

Though Rösler's theory was soon attacked on various points, it was not till last year that a Slav writer, Dr Pic, undertook to assail it all

along the line. His object is clearly explained in the short preface to his work, 'The origin of the Roumanians,' where he says: "An attempt having been made to rob the Slav race of a not inconsiderable portion of its past, both in Hungary and on the Balkan peninsula, it is time that the voice of a Slav should be raised to vindicate the historical inheritance of his race." The strong bias of the author betrays itself even under a tone of almost exaggerated moderation; but if it robs the work as a whole of some of its value, it cannot diminish the strength of many of the arguments which he adduces. If he fails to make good his contention that Moldavia, Wallachia, and a great portion of Eastern Hungary, were throughout the dark ages of history, from the fall of the Roman empire to the beginning of the thirteenth century, tenanted by a sedentary Roman or Romanised population, he has, I think, at least succeeded in reducing to its proper value the preponderance claimed by Rösler for the Wallachs during the same period in the Balkan peninsula.

It does not come within the scope of these