Whether the settlements on the coast north of the Tiber were the remnants of an expelled people, or perhaps mere colonies, can no longer now be ascertained; yet there appear in the middle of Italy, besides those people which were akin to the Greeks, some of a different kind by whom the former indeed were crushed. It seems that those migrations of the different races came about in the same manner as those in modern history. The people which directly precipitates itself upon the Siculians in Latium, and the Italians in Southern Italy proper, partly expelling, and partly absorbing and assimilating them, are the Opicans (_Opici_), a mixed race, which in fact as Opicans exists only in a few places, but is again absorbed by another people, and produces new tribes. They are the same whom we meet with under the name of Apulians; for the terminations, _-icus_ and _-ulus_ are equivalent. The Italian population therefore ends in Apulia; though it reaches in appearance as far as into Messapia, where part only of the Italians maintained themselves in an isolated settlement. Moreover they were in Samnium, Campania, and on the borders of Latium as Volscians and Æquians. These Opicans were in their turn pushed forward by the Sabines (Sabellians), who called themselves aborigines, and traced their source from the highest Alps of Abruzzo near Majella and Gran Sasso d’Italia. Cato in a somewhat extraordinary manner makes them come from Little Amiternum. Whether the Sabellians and Opicans were about as distinct from each other as the Gauls and Ligurians; or in a less degree, like the Celts and Cymri; or whether they belonged to the same stock, and were only politically separated; are questions which we cannot solve. The ancients knew not, nor did they care much about it. When we want to see at any rate where no historical light is to be had, the mind’s eye is dimmed like that of the body when it is violently strained in the dark. Varro indeed distinguishes the Sabine from the Oscan language; but as he was very little of a judge of the earlier languages, in the sense in which we should apply the term to W. von Humboldt, we have also very little reason to rely upon any of his statements concerning the relationship of languages. From a general analogy, I conceive that the tide of emigration must have set in in several streams, and that thus the Sabines also may have been carried down from the higher north by its first rush. Yet this is mere conjecture.