sense of the term, the _Lucanians_, and, within their boundaries, the _Bruttians_. The same country, therefore, must be regarded at one period as Italian, and at another as Oscan, and again at another as Sabellian. This is the cause of the immense confusion. The Sabellians were not a numerous nation, and wherever they settled, they appear to have ruled over the subject people rather than to have changed them; the Oscans seem to have acted differently. In the countries which adopted the Opican name, and had formerly belonged to the Italians, the Opican language supplanted the ancient Italian or Siculian tongue; and when the same countries were taken by the Sabellians, the latter were not numerous enough again to change the language, but they themselves adopted that of the Opicans; and hence the language of the Samnites, Lucanians, and others, is called by the Romans Oscan. It is an established fact, that the ground-work of this language was essentially different from the real Sabine. The whole of the Sabine nation stood to the people among whom they had settled, in the same relation in which the Franks stood to the Gauls, or the Lombards to the nations of Italy. The Franks, for a long time, and in fact until the reign of Charlemagne, spoke Frankish, and the name of the country ever after was France, although the language of the people afterwards became Roman; in like manner the Sabellians bore this name, although their language was Oscan. This is the only method of explaining the apparent contradictions in many ancient accounts: the Oscans and Sabellians were different nations, but their language was the same, the Oscan prevailing everywhere among them. I have for many years laboured to discover how it was possible for the language of the Samnites to be Oscan, seeing that the two nations were essentially, if not altogether, different. Explanations, like that here given by means of comparison with other nations and ages, may be applied to the history of nations as well as to the history of constitutions and laws; a friend of mine, a very ingenious man, has called this “the comparative history of nations,” alluding to comparative natural history. Voltaire says, _comparaison n’est pas raison_, but still it often leads to the truth, though it can never supply the place of real proof. But to return to our subject, while the Greeks exclusively apply the name Opicans to the foreign settlers in those parts, and call the country _Opica_ or _Ausonia_, because the people called themselves _Auruncans_, the natives adhered to the name Italia, although the Italians had either been expelled or were united and mingled with the conquerors. Within this extent of Italy, then, the ruling Sabellians adopted both for themselves and for the Oscans the name of ITALICANS. Thus, according to the rules of the grammatical logic, which pervades the Latin language, we see _Italia_ derived from _Itali_, and from this again the name _Italici_,