Ruthenian invasion of the soil of Bukovina persisted steadily from the eighteenth century on. Galician serfs were driven by oppression to this hitherto unexploited territory. In 1779 the number of Ruthenians in Bukovina was estimated at 21,114. Tombstones of that date found between the Dniester and the Pruth are almost entirely in Rumanian. In 1848 the Ruthenian element in the province numbered 108,907 against 208,293 Rumanians. The census of 1910 places the number of Russian-speaking inhabitants at 305,101, while the users of Rumanian are placed at 273,254. Rumanian authorities, however, call attention to the fact that these figures are determined on the basis of the language most commonly used and not on that of the inherited mother tongue. Rumanian also holds easy predominance in the strange medley of languages which can be heard in the Russian province of Bessarabia. The region forms a natural extension of Moldavia, east of the Pruth furrow, and has always been intimately connected with Rumanian life. It became part of the Czar’s dominion in 1812, after the treaty of Bucarest of May 28 of that year, but the southern part was reincorporated with the principality of Moldavia after the Crimean war. This section was restored, however, to Russia by a decision of the Congress which met in Berlin in June 1878. It has since remained Russian territory. These changes, no less than its position as the narrow corridor between the Asiatic steppeland and southern Europe, have made it the meeting land of Europe’s most untutored elements. The broad hilly spurs bounded by the Dniester and the Pruth contain the bulk of these Bessarabian Rumanians, who make up half the population of the province or nearly one million souls. Interspersed with this native element, German colonists and Bulgarian immigrants,--the latter brought wholesale in the course of Turkey’s European recessional,--and Serbian or Greek cultivators are to be found in many of the villages that nestle in the broad and smiling valleys of the low plateau. The flat marshy tracts along the Pruth and at the mouth of the Danube are occupied by Cosacks and Tatars, while a numerous gipsy element manages to subsist on the rest of the inhabitants by juggling or fortune telling, or frequently by pilfering. The national consolidation of the Rumanians of Bukovina, the Banat and Bessarabia with the main body would supply a non-Slavic linguistic wedge between Russians and Balkan Slavs. But apart from this linguistic difference, Rumanian life and institutions present close analogies with their Russian counterparts. From the standpoint of the anthropologist both countries contain a Slavic substratum strongly diluted by Tatar infiltration. Religious views nursed and cherished in the Kremlin hold spiritual sway throughout the length and breadth of Rumania. And yet, in spite of such strong bonds, and that of immediate neighborhood, language with nationality remains sharply distinct in the two kingdoms.