With a strong inclination to see in the Œnotrian conquest of Greece a _third_ rather a _second_ stream of population, and with the belief that the earliest displacement of the original Skipetar population was effected by movements from Thrace and Macedon (by members of the great Slavonic stock), the Greek occupancy being later than this; favouring, too, the idea that the Pelasgi of Macedon were, at one and the same time, indigenous to the soil, and members of the same stock as the Thracians (the stock being the Slavonic); I am opposed to the broad line of demarcation which so many recent authors have drawn between the Hellenic civilization and the Thracian, a line of demarcation which has led them, in many cases, to explain away rather than admit the evidence of several good writers of antiquity, as to the influence of the Thracian music and the Thracian poetry on early Greece. To claim for the Homeric poems the same amount of Thracian elements that the Welshman claims for those of the cycle of King Arthur, would be to illustrate the _obscurum per obscurius_, inasmuch as the Welshman’s claim is of a somewhat impalpable nature. It cannot attach to the poems themselves, in any known form. They are all in Norman-French, or German, or English, or Italian--none in Welsh. Neither are they translations of a Welsh original now lost. Neither is their subject-matter Welsh to the amount of one-third. Yet, the germ of the fiction is, in some way or other, Welsh, and the claim of the Welshman is, up to a certain point, valid. _Mutatis mutandis_, let us ask whether the Trojan cycle may not, in the same sense, be Slavonic--assuming the Thracians to have belonged to that stock? I. _a._ When we find the name of a non-historical person coincide with that of an historical people or an historical locality, it is a fair inference, all the world over, to consider that form as an _epônymus_. _b._ It is also fair to connect such legends as attach to the name with the people or the locality. _c._ Now several names in the early Greek epic cycles are thus _eponymic_--thus localized in Thracian and other similar localities--Teucer, Æneas, Dardanus, &c. II. Again--the national poetry of the existing Slavonic nations, more nearly approaches--_longo intervallo_, I admit--that of the Homeric Greeks than does that of any other families of mankind. III. The metres do the same. IV. The Sanskrit metres are in the same category with the Slavonic; so that--the European origin of the Sanskrit being admitted--the similarity must be of great antiquity. These points cannot be enlarged on. They form, however, the basis of some claim for the existence of Slavonic elements in the old heroic poetry of Greece; which--it must be remembered--originated on the Helleno-Slavonic debatable land of Æolic Asia.