The evidence of the language is in the same direction. Whence could it have been introduced? Not from the Saxon frontier, since there the Slavonic is Polish rather than Bohemian. Still less from the Silesian, and least of all from the Bavarian. To have developed its differential characteristics, it must have had either Bohemia itself as an original locality, or else the parts south and east of it.
We will now take what is either an undoubted Slavonic locality, or a locality in the neighbourhood of Slavonians, i. e. the country between the rivers Danube and Theiss and that range of hills which connect the Bakonyer-wald with the Carpathians, the country of the Jazyges. Now as Jazyg is a Slavonic word, meaning speech or language, we have, over and above the external evidence which makes the Jazyges Sarmatian, internal evidence as well; evidence subject only to one exception, viz. that perhaps the name in question was not native to the population which it designated, but only a term applied by some Slavonic tribe to some of their neighbours who might or might not be Slavonic. I admit that this is possible, although the name is not of the kind that would be given by one tribe to another different from itself. Admitting, however, this, it still leaves a Slavonic population in the contiguous districts; since, whether borne by the people to whom it was applied or not, Jazyg is a Slavonic gloss from the Valley of the Tibiscus.
Next comes the question as to the date of this population. To put this in the form least favourable to the views of the present writer, is to state that the first author who mentions a population in these parts, either called by others or calling itself Jazyges, is a writer so late as Ptolemy, and that he adds to it the qualifying epithet Metanastæ ([a]Μετανάσται]), a term suggestive of their removal from some other area, and of the recent character of their arrival on the Danube. Giving full value to all this, there still remains the fact of primary importance in all our investigations on the subject in question, viz. that in the time of Ptolemy (at least) there were Slavonians on (or near) the river Theiss.
At present it is sufficient to say that there are no à priori reasons for considering these Jazyges as the most western of the branch to which they belonged, since the whole of the Pannonians may as easily be considered Slavonic as aught else. They were not Germans. They were not Celts; in which case the common rules of ethnological criticism induce us to consider them as belonging to the same class with the population conterminous to them; since unless we do this, we must assume a new division of the human species altogether; a fact, which, though possible, and even probable, is not lightly to be taken up.
So much for the à priori probabilities: the known facts by no means traverse them. The Pannonians, we learn from Dio, were of the same class with the Illyrians, i. e. the northern tribes of that nation. These must have belonged to one of three divisions; the Slavonic, the Albanian, or some division now lost. Of these, the latter is not to be assumed, and the first is more probable than the second. Indeed, the more we make the Pannonians and Illyrians other than Slavonic, the more do we isolate the Jazyges; and the more we isolate these, the more difficulties we create in a question otherwise simple.
That the portion of Pannonia to the north of the Danube (i. e. the north-west portion of Hungary, or the valley of the Waag and Gran) was different from the country around the lake Peiso (Pelso), is a position, which can only be upheld by considering it to be the country of the Quadi, and the Quadi to have been Germanic;—a view, against which there are numerous objections.
Now, here re-appears the term Daci; so that we must recognise the important fact, that east of the Jazyges there are the Dacians (and Getæ) of the Lower, and west of the Jazyges the Daci of the Upper Danube. These must be placed in the same category, both being equally either Slavonic or non-Slavonic.
a. Of these alternatives, the first involves the following real or apparent difficulty, i. e. that, if the Getæ are what the Daci are, the Thracians are what the Getæ are. Hence, if all three be Slavonic, we magnify the area immensely, and bring the Slavonians of Thrace in contact with the Greeks of Macedonia. Granted. But are there any reasons against this? So far from there being any such in the nature of the thing itself, it is no more than what is actually the case at the present moment.
b. The latter alternative isolates the Jazyges, and adds to the difficulties created by their ethnological position, under the supposition that they are the only Slavonians of the parts in question; since if out-lyers to the area (exceptional, so to say), they must be either invaders from without, or else relics of an earlier and more extended population. If they be the former, we can only bring them from the north of the Carpathian mountains (a fact not in itself improbable, but not to be assumed, except for the sake of avoiding greater difficulties); if the latter, they prove the original Slavonic character of the area.