Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/630

614 Thirty years ago estimates of the number of people speaking the Basque language or Euskara ran all the way from four to seven hundred thousand. Probability pointed to about a round half million, which has perhaps become six hundred thousand today; although large numbers have emigrated of recent years to South America, and the rate of increase in France, at least, is very slow. About four fifths of these are found in the Spanish provinces of Vizcaya (Biscay), Navarra, Guipuzcoa, and Alava,



at the western extreme of the Pyrenean frontier and along the coast. (See map page 632.) The remainder occupy the southwestern third of the department of Basses-Pyrénées over the mountains in France. The whole territory covered is merely a spot on the European map. It is by quality, therefore, and not in virtue either of numbers or territorial extension, that these people merit our attention. In the preceding paper we aimed to