Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/654

632 century is not wanting. The truth seems to be that two forces were contending for the control of eastern Europe. The Latin could prevail only in those regions which were beyond the potent influence of Greece. Dacia being remote and barbarian, this Latin element had a fighting chance for survival, and succeeded.

Our ethnic map at page 614 shows a curious islet of Roumanian language in the heart of the Greek-speaking territory of Thessaly. There is little sympathy between the two peoples, according to Hellène. The occurrence of this Roumanian colony, so far removed from its base, has long puzzled ethnographers. Some believe the peoples were separately Romanized in situ; others that they were colonists from Dacia in the ninth and tenth centuries. At all events, these Pindus Roumanians are too numerous—over a million souls—to be neglected in any theory as to the origin of their language. Another islet of quasi-Roumanian speech occurs in Istria, on the Adriatic coast. Its origin is equally obscure.

It is no contradiction that, in spite of the fact of our exclusion of Roumania from the Balkan Peninsula owing to its Latin affinities, thereby seeming to differentiate it sharply from Bulgaria, the latter of Finnic origin; that we now proceed to treat of the physical characteristics of the two nationalities, Roumanian and Bulgarian, together. Here is another example of the superficiality of language, of social and political institutions. They do not concern the fundamental physical facts of race in the least. At the same time we again emphasize the necessity of a powerful corrective, based upon purely natural phenomena, for the tendency of philologists and ethnographers to follow their pet theories far afield, giving precedence to analogies of language and customs over all the potent facts of geographical probability. Let us look at it in this light. Is there any chance that, on the opposite sides of the Danube, a few Finns and a few Romans respectively interposed among the dense population which so fertile an area must have possessed, even at an early time, could be in any wise competent to make different types of the two? There is nothing in our confessedly scanty anthropological data to show it, at all events. We must treat the lower Danubian plain as a unit, irrespective of the bounds of language, religion, or nationality.

It was long believed that the Bulgarians were distinctive among the other peoples of eastern Europe by reason of their long-headedness. All the investigations upon limited series of crania pointed in that direction. This naturally was interpreted as a confirmation of the historic data as to a Finnic Bulgarian origin very distinct from that of the broad-headed Slavs. Several recent discoveries have put a new face upon the matter. In the first place, researches by Dr.