We know only five of them; ANAGNIA was the capital, to which the others were opposed as a political body. We here again find a parallel phenomenon: the same relation which existed between Alba and the Albensian towns, and between Rome and the Latin towns, appears to have existed between Anagnia and the towns of the Hernicans. This is briefly, but officially, alluded to in the Triumphal Fasti, where Q. Marcius Tremulus triumphs _de Anagninis Hernicisque_. The other towns were _Frusino_, _Ferentinum_, _Verulae_, and _Alatrium_. There can, however, be no doubt that they had more towns; some must have been taken from them by the Volscians and Aequians, while others may have continued to exist, but decayed and perished, so that we have no information about them. Livy, in speaking of the last war against the Hernicans, says, _omnes Hernici nominis populi_, except three. I have a conjecture which is a combination of several traces, and according to which their number was forty. All the five above-mentioned places still exist; they are generally small and poor, with the exception of Anagnia, which is a place of some consequence; but all of them are still imposing on account of their ruins and their mighty Cyclopean walls, in which towers and gates are still preserved. Servius, on the Aeneid, and the ancient Scholia on Virgil, fragments of which were published about ten years ago by A. Mai from a Veronese MS., state that the name _Hernici_ is derived from the Sabine word _hernae_, which Arndt very happily compares with the Swiss _firn_ (mountain); as there exists a radical affinity between the two languages, such a comparison is certainly admissible. According to this, the Hernicans were a Sabine or Marsian colony. Another statement, however, though of very weak authority, in Julius Hyginus, makes the Hernicans Pelasgians. If we consider that the Sabines pressed forward at a comparatively late period, perhaps about the time of the foundation of Rome, and that the Hernicans dwelt on the other side of the Oscan nation of the Aequians, it is probable that the Hernicans, like the Latins, were of Tyrrhenian origin. An etymology like that mentioned before is very captivating, and it is not easy to get rid of it; but if we ask ourselves, What is the ground of the derivation? How could the name come from their habitations? Did the other Sabines call them Hernicans in the same manner in which the Scotch Lowlanders call the Gael in the mountains Highlanders? It is possible that the name Hernicans is only a surname to another national name; they may, in this case, have belonged to a different race, and have received that surname from the Sabines. That a people should call itself mountaineers from its habitations is very surprising. The derivation may be very accidental: in like manner the Thuringians might be said to owe their name to the old word _Taure_, which signifies “mountain.” If we assume that the Hernicans were Tyrrhenians, they occupied exactly