that fighting against Turks in Palestine however much it might be for their soul's health, was not particularly profitable as regarded bodily things, and accordingly in the first half of the thirteenth century they transferred their pious exertions to Prussia, and under their fourth grand master Hermann von Salza they set about the work of riding down Slavonian and Lithuanian peasants, and converting them from heathen freemen into Christian serfs. Readers

of Chaucer will remember how he writes that his "Parfit gentil Knight in Lettowe hadde reised and in Ruce", he had made an expedition (er hatte gereist) in Lithuania and in Prussia, that is, he had been a Crusade with the Knights of the German order, and had helped them in one of their incursions into Courland and Livonia. And the German Order remained lords paramount in Prussia down to the close of the Reformation when their last grand master, Albert of Brandenburg, adopted Protestantism, gave up his vow of celibacy, and became the ancestor of the Prussian royal family.

But we have sufficiently expatiated upon German conquests, it is time to turn to those of the Scandinavians, the northern division of the Gothic race. At an early period, perhaps as early as the Saxon conquest of Britain, the Scandinavians had pressed southward into Denmark, and perhaps at an equally early period they may have settled in the Orkney and Shetland Islands and the North of Scotland. But their main exploits were done in the full daylight of history. The empire of Charlemagne, if we may venture in the absence of our president to call him by that Frenchified title, dates from the year A.D. 800. And it was the power of Charlemagne which by rendering land expeditions impossible drove the Scandinavians, that is, the Danes and Norsemen, to their great expeditions by sea. For two centuries this island was harassed by their invasions; but there was this difference between the invasions of the Danes, and those of the Angles and Saxons four hundred years before; the Angles and Saxons were little tribes, who came to settle, and brought their women and children with them, the Danes and Norsemen were great naval hosts, under great leaders, and composed of men only. The consequence was that wherever

the Danes settled they had to take wives from the conquered English. But with that limitation the Danes and Norsemen produced the greatest possible effects both on the population and the language of those parts of the island where they settled, and at this day the northern counties of England, and the lowlands of Scotland are Scandinavian rather than German. The other great conquest by the Norsemen was of course that part of France which from them took the name of Normandy. Here they rapidly adopted the French language and the French religion, that is to say Christianity. And it was as a French speaking people that the Normans under their Duke William advanced in 1066 to the final conquest of England. England however was by no means the only scene of Norman conquests: Normans from Normandy ruled for a time in Sicily and in Apulia; indeed as Macaulay has said, in every country from Palestine to Ireland they were victorious against tenfold odds, and in fact wherever by force or fraud booty was to be obtained the Norsemen were the men to get it.

The Slavonians on the other hand were apparently doomed to be always conquered either by Germans from the west, or Tartars from the east. We have spoken of the Slavonians in Prussia. The Slavonians in Bohemia and Croatia have been ruled by Austrian Germans. The Poles have been trodden down by Prussian and Austrian Germans, and by their own kindred, the Russians. As to the Russians themselves there is a French saying that if you scratch a Russian you find a Tartar underneath; but it is the reverse of the truth, the Tartar has been above the Russian, not underneath him. For two centuries and a half from the year A.D. 1236 the Russians were subject to the Tartar Khan of the Golden Horde, until at last they succeeded in shaking off the yoke, but the people of all the Russias, great, little, white, red and black Russia are just as much Slavonians as the Bohemians or the Poles. There are besides the Servians and Bulgarians who have been subject, and some of whom are still subject to the Turks. Only the handful of Slavonians who inhabit Montenegro have managed there in their Black Mountain to maintain their independence. And this concludes our notice of the people of Eastern Europe

with two exceptions. These exceptions are 1, The Roumanians; 2, The Hungarians. The Roumanians, that is the inhabitants of Moldavia and Wallachia are Aryans but not Slavonians. They are the most northern portion of what I have called the Pelasgian race, separated by the interposition of the Bulgarians from their kindred the Albanians of Albania. But they speak a Latinized dialect like the French, the Spaniards, and the people of the Grisons. The Roman emperor Trajan conquered them, and reduced their country to the condition of a Roman province in the year A.D. 104. The Roman government there lasted only one hundred and seventy years, yet it had such an effect that they speak a language derived from the Latin, and call themselves Roumani, that is Romans. The other exception is the Hungarians. Now the first thing to be said about the Hungarians is that they have nothing to do with the Huns of Attila, except indeed that they belong to the same Tartar race, though to another branch of it. The Huns under Attila were a devastating Tartar horde, "the scourge of God" as they were called in the fifth century A.D. They wandered marauding through Europe till at last they were defeated by the Roman general Aetius and Theodoric, King of the Visigoths in the great battle of Chalons-sur-Marne in the year A.D. 451. This blow checked the Huns, and after two or three more campaigns they disappear from history. Their hand had been against every man and now in return every man's hand was against them; a few of them may have been admitted into other tribes, but the great bulk were, as I imagine, slaughtered in detail. And of course therefore they have no relation to the population of modern Europe. The ancestors of the Hungarians were a similar Tartar horde five hundred years later. They belonged like the Lapps and Finns to the Ugrian division of the Tartar race. They called themselves Ugrians, Ugars, Ogars. From their name, and from the terror of their name the word Ogre has got into use in our fairy tales to signify a cannibal monster. But the name which they most frequently used, and which they still use for themselves is Magyars.

These Magyars roamed through Europe as a plundering horde till at last the emperor Otho with his Germans overthrew them in

the great battle at the Lechfeld, that is the Lichfield, the field of corpses, near Augsburg in the year A.D. 955. After this defeat the Magyars fell back to the fertile plains of Hungary, where they settled down and became a prosperous nation. Some thirty years ago it was the fashion in Birmingham to regard the Hungarians with great admiration, but I have never been able to understand the reason why. Descended from a horde of murderous savages they have managed to settle in a fertile country, and have learned agriculture from the nations round them, but they have produced no great poem, no great building, no great law. Neither in arts, nor in science, nor in literature, nor in statesmanship have they added any thing to the resources of the human race. Military valour indeed they have, a quality which is seldom lacking in a Tartar tribe, but the fact that they have generally, though not always, opposed the advance of their cousins the Turks is, as far as I know, their solitary claim on the gratitude of mankind.

We come lastly to the two cases which I have put down as unsolved problems, the Etruscans and the Basques. The Etruscans are interesting to us from the influence which they are supposed to have had on the laws, and especially on the religion of early Rome. But they ceased to have a separate existence more than two thousand years ago, and the only undoubted memorials which they have left behind are a few sepulchral inscriptions in an unknown language which is still a puzzle to philologists. Where they came from is a mystery. Niebuhr, always ready to cut a knot which he cannot untie, makes them a northern race from Rhaetia, that is from the Tyrol. But this seems to be little more than a guess, founded chiefly on a fancied resemblance between the name Rhaetia and the name Rasena, by which the Etruscans called themselves. And we shall perhaps be more disposed to agree with Professor Francis Newman that the tradition handed down to us by Herodotus may after all be right, viz. that the Etruscans, always noted for their maritime activity, were an oriental race who came by sea from Lydia in Asia Minor, and settled as conquerors among the native inhabitants of Tuscany. In this case they would probably be as few in proportion as the Normans in England, and like the Nor

mans in England would gradually lose themselves among the more numerous population which they had conquered.

The Basques are more interesting because they still exist as a hardy race of some 400,000 persons in the Basque provinces of Spain, between the Pyrenees and the Bay of Biscay, and there are a few thousands more across the French frontier in the Department of the Basses Pyrénées. Where the Basques came from no one can state with any certainty, except that they are not Aryans either of the Keltic or any other tribe. Niebuhr solves all difficulties by bringing them from Africa across the straits of Gibraltar. Their language does not help us much, it is so unlike all other languages. Professor Max Müller carefully omits it, both in his Aryan list, and in his Turanian list. Perhaps, therefore, he agrees with Niebuhr in considering it to be African. Probably, however, the only man out of Spain who has a familiar acquaintance with the Basque language is Mr. George Borrow, and he states that it is Turanian in character. It is not unlikely therefore that the ancestors of the Basques were the most southern of the early Turanian wanderers in Europe, as the ancestors of the Laplanders were the most northern. But the most interesting question is, are the Basques of the same stock as the rest of the Spaniards? Is their position like that of the Bretons in France, or like that of the Welsh in Britain? The Bretons in France differ from the bulk of Frenchmen in language only, not in race; while the Welsh differ from the English in race as well as in language. Perhaps when we consider the numerous Aryan migrations into Spain, migrations of Pelasgians, Kelts, Vandals, and Visigoths, all belonging to the Aryan stock, we shall be inclined to think it probable that the majority of the Spaniards are at least in part of Aryan descent, like the other principal nations of Europe.

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Here ends our historical sketch. There are two questions partly metaphysical, and partly practical which I should have liked to ask one is, What is a race? and the other, How far are race characteristics uneffaceable? But it is impossible to discuss them at the close of a paper like the present, and I can only ask you to excuse the bare skeleton which I have been able to present to you of so important and interesting a subject.