We have little evidence for, and much against, the existence of Rumanian speech north of the Danube for nearly a thousand years after Rome abandoned this outlying region. Dacia was one of the last provinces to be occupied by Rome and was the first from which the legions were withdrawn upon the decline of the Empire. The northern Carpathians, furthermore, where the Rumanians claim to have taken refuge during the barbarian invasions formed part of the Slavic homeland and it was in these same mountains and in the Ruthenian districts of eastern Galicia that the Slavic languages were developed, probably by the Sarmatians and Venethi, from whence they spread in all directions in the centuries that immediately followed the fall of Rome. So it is almost impossible to credit the survival of a frontier community of Romanized natives situated not only in the path of the great invasions of Europe from the east, but also in the very spot where Slavic tongues were at the time evolving. Rumanian speech occupies large areas outside of the present kingdom of Rumania, in Russian Bessarabia, Austrian Bukowina and above all in Hungarian Transylvania. The linguistic problem is further complicated by the existence in the Pindus Mountains of Thessaly of another large community of Vlachs of Rumanian speech. How this later community could have survived from Roman times until to-day, untouched either by the Greek language of the Byzantine Empire or by the Turkish conquest is another difficult problem. The evidence, on the whole, points to the descent of the Vlachs from the early inhabitants of Thrace, who adopted Latin speech in the first centuries of the Christian era and clung to it during the domination of the Bulgarians from the seventh century onward in the lands south of the Danube. In the thirteenth century the mass of these Vlachs, leaving scattered remnants behind them, crossed the Danube and founded Little and Great Wallachia. From there they spread into Transylvania and a century later into Moldavia. The solution of this problem receives no assistance from anthropology, as these Rumanian-speaking populations both on the Danube and in the Pindus Mountains in no way differ physically from their neighbors on all sides. But through whatever channel they acquired their Latin speech the Rumanians of to-day can lay no valid claim to blood descent even in a remote degree from the true Romans. The first Aryan languages known in western Europe were the Celtic group which first appears west of the Rhine about 1000 B. C. Only a few dim traces of Pre-Aryan speech have been found in the British Isles, and these largely in place names. The Pre-Aryan language of the Pre-Nordic population of Britain may have survived down to historic times as Pictish.