there are, especially of rivers and mountains, upon the map of Spain. Only in Galicia and the Asturias the Keltic and the Latin, in the Basque Provinces the Basque, and in Catalonia the Romance names have held their own. In all the rest the Roman names would have probably died away, but that the language of the Church was Latin, and preserved the Roman names of cities, monasteries, and shrines. Down even to the twelfth century it might seem doubtful which language would prevail, so many Arabs wrote in Spanish, and Spaniards in Arabic, or wrote Spanish in Arabic characters. The struggle was decided by the sword; the expulsion of the Arabs was also the expulsion of their tongue. Yet the Arabs have left far more traces on Spanish than Spanish has done on Arabic. The Spanish Jews, however, had forgotten their Semitic tongue, and to this day the sacred language of the Jews of the Balkan Peninsula, and of many of the Syrian Jews, even of those at Jerusalem, is not Hebrew but Spanish; their liturgical works are written in that tongue, and they use it always in the synagogue. In spite, however, of all this mixture of races and of languages, Spain and the Spanish language has perhaps fewer dialects than any other European speech. From the Central Pyrenees to the Straits of Gibraltar only one dialect is used, the Spanish or Castilian, the purest and noblest of those which sprang from the decaying Latin. At the inner angle of the Bay of Biscay Basque is still spoken by a population of about 400,000 souls. The Galician dialect is far more closely allied to the Portuguese than to the Spanish, and should be considered as belonging to the former tongue. Between Galicia and the Basque Provinces are the many Patois, or Bables, of Asturia, which alone of the Romance tongues in the Peninsula have kept the three distinct genders, the masculine, feminine, and neuter terminations of the Latin adjective. The speech of Leon, too, may be classed as a separate dialect. In Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Isles a Provencal or Romance dialect is spoken, the _Lemosin_ as it was called in mediaeval times, and which stretched from the Loire to the frontiers of Murcia, and from the western coast of the Bay of Biscay, with few interruptions, almost to the Black Sea. In the thirteenth century the Catalan dialect more resembled that of the Gascon Bearnais, or the Western Languedocian, than of the neighbouring Provence, but centuries of intercourse have since modified it, and the three dialects of Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Isles must now be classed as a Provencal speech.