together from the four ends of the earth. True, such a result might have been expected from the vicissitudes through which the Greek nation has passed. Hellenic independence was first lost to Macedonian sway. Then the conquering legions of Rome swept over the land, and Greece became a Roman province. Then Goths, Slavs, and Albanians in turn overran the country; and finally the wretched, unspeakable Turks for four long centuries held proud Greece enslaved beneath their barbarous yoke. And still, the natural inference that Hellenic blood was wofully contaminated is all too hastily drawn. Philip of Macedon conquered Greece, but no Macedonian emigrants ever followed in the wake of his victorious arms. There was no mixture from that source. The same is true of the Romans. Yes; it is more than true of the Romans; for while the armies of Rome took possession of the soil of Greece and made of it a Roman province, the literature and art and civilization of Greece took captive her proud captor, and the whole Roman world became Hellenized. Numerically significant was the invasion of the Albanese alone, and they did not appear until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Now, from the day of Homer till the present hour, his nationality has

ever been to the Greek his loftiest pride; he is several degrees above the rest of the world-to him a world of barbarians; and he was far too great and far too good even to dream of such a thing as intermarriage with the barbarians of Albania, to him almost as repulsive as the hated Turk. Even to this day, the two races dwell largely in separate villages, and intermarriage between them is rare, if not unknown.

But positive proofs of the survival of the Greek nationality are not wanting. The first is the preservation of the physical types. As fine physiques and as beautiful faces and forms of classic mould are yet to be found-especially in the islands and in the highlands-as ever sat as models for Praxiteles and Apelles. When the writer of this brief sketch was conducting the excavations at Thoricus for the American School, the foreman of his gang of workman was one "Achilles," whose portrait in marble would have been a worthy representation of his great namesake of Trojan story. To be sure, we find also here and there a Slavic type. But are the Greeks no Greeks for that? Then, we, who so proudly boast ourselves the Anglo-Saxon race, are neither English, nor Saxon, nor Anglo-Saxon. Then, even the Germans, with all their exclus

iveness, are not German; for Saxon, Wendic, and Slavic blood flows together in almost equal proportions through their veins. The fact is, ethnology can no longer understand by the word "people" a group of individuals having a common origin. The conception has become now rather a psychological one, for which the most essential moment (though not necessarily the final one) is that of identity of language. As all the foreign linguistic elements have been thoroughly assimilated to the Greek, so what little foreign blood has been introduced into Grecian veins has been taken up in the same way and Hellenized completely. Even those dreadful Slavs of Fallmerayer's have left less than a hundred words in the whole Greek vocabulary, and the Albanese scarcely as many. Our second positive proof-the same that makes the Germans German and the Americans Anglo-Saxon -will also make the Greeks Greek. I mean their language. The real essence of a people's nationality and its own identity are to be sought more by far in its language, and, next to that, in its ways of thinking and feeling. The most palpable of all our proofs is that of language, and the language of modern Greece is Greek.

In these days our ears are continually dinned

with opprobrious remarks about the "dead languages," by which are usually meant Latin and Greek. Latin is, to be sure, a "dead language," although its children live in the modern Romance languages. The same thing is true of Sanskrit and Persian. Hebrew, on the other hand, is a language that is dead and has left no progeny. But in neither sense, nor in any sense,

is Greek or has Greek ever been a dead lan

guage. Sophocles, Plato, and Demosthenes are dead; therefore, argue some, Greek, as a language, must be dead. But the golden age of English letters also is past; and Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and Milton are dead. By that same logic, therefore, let English also be henceforth classed among the "dead languages." Or, if that does not follow, then Greek is no more dead than English. For the Greek of the books and magazines published in Athens to-day is not more different from the Greek of Aristotle and Xenophon than the English we read and write is different from the English of Shakespeare. Thucydides and Pericles might stroll into a café on the Constitution Square to-morrow and read and understand the morning papers perfectly, except in so far as they might be surprised at a telegraphic despatch, dazzled by our electric

lights, and completely overrun with steamboat and railroad news. The Apostle Paul could stray into the lecture-rooms of the University of Athens to-day—and a splendid institution it is, by the way—and without difficulty take notes; he might even sustain an active part in the discussions philosophical and theological, understanding and being understood. For the most serious change between the times of Pericles and the present is a matter of pronunciation, and that had been largely effected by apostolic times.

Lest I be misunderstood, however, let me hasten to explain that Paul might not get along quite so well outside the academic halls. There are, indeed, four distinct gradations in the modern Greek tongue: (1) The language of the books and papers, which, I have said, is very like that of our classical authors; (2) The language of the learned, which is closely akin to the language of the New Testament and almost identical with the official language of the Byzantian Empire; (3) The medium of conversation between people of ordinary, common school education, which is about as far removed from the language of the learned as theirs is from that of the books and papers. And, finally, (4) The every day, plebeian jargon of the où Tool,