In European ethnology one main feature is that the population of Europe is, and from the very beginnings of history has been, more nearly homogeneous, at least more palpably homogeneous, than that of any other great division of the world. ♦Europe an Aryan continent.♦ Whether we look at Europe now, or whether we look at it at the earliest times of which we have any glimmerings, it is pre-eminently an Aryan continent. Everything non-Aryan is at once marked as exceptional. We cannot say this of Asia, where, among several great ethnical elements, none is so clearly predominant as the Aryan element is in Europe. ♦Non-Aryan remnants.♦ There are in Europe non-Aryan elements, both earlier and later than the Aryan settlement; but they have, as a rule, been assimilated to the prevailing Aryan mass. The earlier non-Aryan element consists of the remnants which still remain of the races which the Aryan settlers found in Europe, and which they either exterminated or assimilated to themselves. The later elements consist of non-Aryan races which have made their way into Europe within historical times, in whose case the work of assimilation has been much less complete. It follows almost naturally from the position of Europe that the primæval non-Aryan element has survived in the west and in the north, while the later or intrusive non-Aryan element has made its way into the east and the south. In the mountains of the western peninsula, in the border lands of Spain and Gaul, the non-Aryan tongue of the _Basque_ still survives. In the extreme north of Europe the non-Aryan tongue of the _Fins_ and _Laps_ still survives. The possible relations of these tongues either to one another or to other non-Aryan tongues beyond the bounds of Europe is a question of purely philological concern, and does not touch historical geography. But historical geography is touched by the probability, rising almost to moral certainty, that the isolated populations by whom these primitive tongues are still spoken are mere remnants of the primitive races which formed the population of Europe at the time when the Aryans first made their way into that continent. Everything tends to show that the _Basques_ are but the remnant of a great people whom we may set down with certainty as the præ-Aryan inhabitants of Spain and a large part of Gaul, and whose range we may, with great probability, extend over Sicily, over part at least of Italy, and perhaps as far north as our own island. Their possible connexion with the early inhabitants of northern Africa hardly concerns us. The probability that they were themselves preceded by an earlier and far lower race concerns us not at all. The earliest historical inhabitants of south-western Europe are those of whom the Basques are the surviving remnant, those who, under the names of _Iberians_ and _Ligurians_, fill a not unimportant place in European history. ♦Order of the Aryan settlement.♦