On the first glance at a map of Spain and Portugal we are apt to think that few countries could have so well-defined a frontier as that formed by the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. In so compact a country, and one so distinct and so shut off from the rest of Europe, we should expect to find a more unmixed and a more homogeneous population than in any of those states whose frontiers are more open and conventional. But such is very far from being the case. Even at the present time the Pyrenees are no boundary throughout their whole course, either as to race or language. The Basque overlaps them at one end, and the Provencal at the other. Moreover, they have been a political boundary throughout their whole length only since the middle of the seventeenth century. Navarre was united to the Spanish crown in 1515, and Rousillon to France only in 1659. Ecclesiastically, both the dioceses of Bayonne and of Narbonne advanced far into Spain. So far from the population of Spain being unmixed and pure, the contrary is far nearer the truth. As Senor Tubino has well observed, from its position at the south-western angle of Europe, and the most westerly of Mediterranean lands, beyond which lay only the impassable ocean, it must early have become a very eddy of nations, where all the tribes and races who have successively held command of the Mediterranean must necessarily have halted, over which and in which all invaders who have crossed the Pyrenees from Northern Europe, or have passed the Straits of Gibraltar from Africa, must have surged in almost ceaseless conflict. To think of Spain as ever having been at any given time occupied solely by any single race or people is to lose the clue to her whole history. Of this not only the social and political condition of the country, but the toponymy and nomenclature of her map afford decisive proof.