also here. In Pomerania and Mecklenburg, without any immigration of Germans, merely owing to the predilection of the princes, the Vandal language has vanished in the course of one or two generations. The conquerors of the march of Brandenburg forbade the use of the Vandal tongue on pain of death, and nothing soon was spoken but the Low German, (plattdeutsch). The Etruscans had quite an aristocratical constitution, and they lived in their towns in the midst of a large subjected country; under such circumstances, it could not but be of great importance to them, that the people should adopt their language. The Rasena came down from the Alps as conquerors, since, according to Livy and Strabo, not only the Rhætians, but also the other Alpine tribes, the Camunians, the Lepontians on the Lake of Como, were of Etruscan race. That they were forced by the Gallic conquest to retire from the plain into the Alps, has never been said by any of the ancients; and it is absurd to think that a people which fled before the Gauls from the Patavinian plain, should have been able to subdue the mountaineers of the Alps, or have been allowed to have any footing there, unless those regions had already before been occupied by others of the same tribe. We have the tradition, probably from Cato, that the Etruscans had taken three hundred Umbrian towns;--these must be considered as belonging to the interior of Tuscany;--and a long time afterwards, a district in Tuscany is called Umbria, and a river, Umbro. The Etruscans are therefore one of those northern nations which were driven to the south by the pressure of some of those national migrations which are quite as historically certain as the later ones, although we do not find any record of them,--national migrations like that which had driven the Illyrians forward, so that the Illyrian Enchelians, about the fortieth Olympiad, burst into Greece, and sacked Delphi, as Herodotus tells us. Such a national migration drove the Etruscans from the north. They once inhabited Switzerland and the Tyrol; nay, it surely happened to the Etruscans in those countries, as it did also to the Celts in Spain, that some tribes kept their ground longer than the other. The heathen wall on the Ottilienberg in Alsace, which Schweighäuser has described as one of the most remarkable and unaccountable of monuments, is evidently an Etruscan work: it has exactly the character of Etruscan fortification, as we see it at Volterra, Cortona, and Fiesole. Some would have this called the Gallic style of building; yet quite groundlessly, as we may see both from Cæsar’s description, and also from other remains and structures in Gaul. There are two essentially distinct kinds of fortifications in central Italy. The one are the so-called Cyclopian Walls, built in polygons, which alternate with intentional irregularity along the slope of a hill, in such a manner that it has become quite scarped, but at the summit it is without walls. The ascent is by a ledge on