For the north-western Neapolitans in the Upper Abruzzo, the descent is from the southern Piceni, the Vestini, the Frentani, the Peligni, the Marsi, and other less important tribes, which it is difficult to distribute, _i.e._, to say, how far they approached the Umbrian type in the north, or the Samnite, in the centre of Italy. It is difficult, too, to say whether some of them were Latin or Oscan most. All this is difficult, but, except to the minute ethnologist, unimportant. It is enough to remember that when we reach the ancient Samnium and Campania, the type has changed, at least, in respect to language; for the speech is neither Umbrian nor Latin, though the detail of the differences and agreements between the Samnite and Campanian dialects is difficult. The language itself is the Oscan, or Opican, spoken at different times as far north as the neighbourhood of Rome, and as far south as Bruttium; where, however, it was not indigenous. It was common to Samnium and Campania, but not to Lucania and Apulia, _originally_. The general name for the nations that spoke it will be _Ausonian_. The Oscan is known to us from inscriptions, and is, at the least, as closely allied as the Umbrian to-- _The Latin._--I think the Latin was the language of the _more southern of the earliest_ inhabitants of Etruria; so that at the time of the foundation of Rome, important as it was destined to become afterwards, it was in the position of the Cornish of Cornwall about three centuries ago. It may also be compared with the modern Frisian of Friesland, a tongue spoken at present over a small and unimportant area, but one which was once spread far and wide over northern Germany. If the Welsh were to reconquer England, or the Frisians Germany, the phenomenon which I imagine to have been presented by the history of Rome would be repeated. A people conquered up to a certain point react on their conquerors, vanquish them, and a fourth of the world besides. This opinion is, of course, the result of general ethnological reasoning, rather than the testimony of historians; yet I am not aware of any undoubted fact that it opposes. It stands or falls by the phenomena it explains. The chief of these is the peculiar character of the Latin language. Is any one prepared to consider it the result of an intermixture of two or more dialects? Or to limit its original area to a district not twenty miles across? For myself I do neither one nor the other. I look upon it as a separate and independent mode of speech, even as the Umbrian and the Oscan, and, I cannot think that the Seven Hills of Rome were sufficient to constitute the area of its development. Yet to these it must be limited; for the Etruscan reached below Veii, the Oscan to the neighbourhood of Ardea and Præneste, and the Sabine below Cures; and it must be remembered that, however like the two dialects may have been, the _Sabine was not Latin_.