I neither deny nor assert that any one of these three causes is the true one. I only draw attention to a remarkably common inconsistency. A very little amount of ethnological literature will satisfy any one who makes the search that the number of writers who write about race, and who are, nevertheless, wholly unprepared for either of the first two explanations of its origin, is very great. So that they admit the third, and the third only. If so, why make so much of the distinction?

In the special question before us we are in great danger of overvaluing this undefined element; imagining that intellectual pre-eminence of the highest kind was the original endowment of a section of mankind called Hellenes. That these Hellenes were so favoured is certain, but that they were a race at all is doubtful. Unless the necessity of connecting the Latin and Greek languages in geography as well as in philology have been overvalued, and, along with it, the difficulty of doing so by any simple extension of the two areas, the natural inference from the necessary consequences of a maritime migration follows as a matter of course, viz., the probability of the blood on the mother’s side having been different from that of the father—the one Italian, the other native to the soil. If so, there is an Hellenic language, an Hellenic literature, an Hellenic influence in the world’s history. But there is no Hellenic stock. The tongue belongs to Hellas, and the blood to Italy.

Subject, then, to the correctness of the Italian hypothesis, what was the native stock of Hellas? Pelasgic. What means this? The proper place for this inquiry is the chapter on the ethnology of Turkey, for in two Turkish localities only have any Pelasgi existed within the historical period. A negative statement, however, will find place here. Whatever the Pelasgi were, they were not, at one and the same time, the earliest occupants of Hellas, and a population belonging to the same class with the Hellenes. The reasons which lie against making the Hellenes aboriginal to Greece lie also against any other Hellenoeid population.

The magnitude of the earliest historical Hellenic area is of importance. Let Greece under the leadership of Agamemnon be as truly Hellenic as Kent and Essex were Anglo-Saxon in the reign of Alfred. What does it prove in the way of the occupants being aboriginal? As little as the English character of the counties in question at the time referred to. Four centuries—or even less—of migration may easily have given us all the phenomena that occur; for the area is smaller than the kingdom of Wessex, or Northumberland, and the country but little more impracticable.

Hence, if we sufficiently recognise the smallness of the Hellenic area, no difficulties against the doctrine of an original non-Hellenic population will arise on the score of its magnitude. It was as easily convertible from non-Hellenic to Hellenic as Cumberland and Northumberland have been from British to English.

And that that area was actually very small indeed is evident to any inquirer who will take up the measure of it without any prepossessions in favour of its magnitude, and limit his Hellas to those parts only which can be shown to have been Greek; in order to do which he must draw no undue inferences in favour of the identity of the Hellenic and Phrygian languages from the negative fact of Homer saying nothing about interpreters; build nothing on the ubiquity of the Pelasgi, every one of whose migrations is as unsupported by historical evidence, as the migration of Æneas to Italy, or that of Antenor to Venice; and, lastly, satisfy himself with the “Catalogue of the Ships,” as the earliest geographical notice of ancient Greece. I think that this list is more likely to contain populations which were not Hellenic than to omit any that were; and, with the single exception of the Acarnanians, I imagine that this is the current opinion. The Acarnanians alone of all the Hellenes are said to have taken no part in the Trojan war; and on the strength of their non-intervention we hear of them some nine hundred years afterwards, putting in a claim for the good offices of the Romans, the supposed descendants of those Trojans whom the other Hellenes so cruelly conquered, and the Acarnanians so generously left alone. Yet it by no means follows that because the Acarnanians were Greeks during the Peloponnesian war, they were Greeks in the ninth century B.C., any more than it follows that because the men of Monmouth are English at the present moment they were so during the heptarchy. What should we say to the writer who, in the reign of Queen Victoria, should say that the only people of England who took no part in the wars of the Saxons against the Britons were the Cornishmen? Surely we should accuse him of an anachronism, and suggest the fact of his Cornishmen having been at the time in question, no Saxons at all, but Britons. The same reason applies to the statements concerning the Acarnanians; inasmuch as it is highly probable that they are absent from the Homeric list of Greeks, because they were other than Greek in respect to their nationality. It was only when the Greek frontier extended itself northwards that they became Hellenized. Then, too, it was that the later writers who fancied that they must always have been what they were in their own days, superadded the doctrine of their having been Hellenic to the fact of their non-appearance in the Homeric catalogue. For it must be remembered that, even in the third century B.C.—nay even at the present moment—the Acarnanians are a frontier population, in contact with the non-Hellenic Illyrians of old, and the non-Hellenic Skipetars of the nineteenth century. It must also be remembered that notice of their absence from Troy is nowhere to be found in the Homeric poems. No passage runs to the effect “that the Acarnanians alone took no share in the war under the walls of sacred Ilion, but remained ingloriously at home.” If it were so, the previous hypothesis would be futile.

Upon the whole, I think that Acarnania was in the same category with the nearly opposite island of Corcyra—Greek in the time of the historian, but not Greek in the time of the Homeric poems.

So little, however, depends upon this view of the character of the earliest Acarnanians that the notice of them is rather an episodical piece of detail, than anything affecting the general question of the size of Homeric Greece. It may have contained Acarnania, and still have been small enough for the purposes suggested, i.e., small enough to have been converted from non-Hellenic to Hellenic within a very few centuries.

On the eastern side of Greece the most northern members of the confederation are the Thessalians and Perrhæbi; but whether the latter were Hellenic is uncertain. We may admit them, however, to have been so. Macedon and Thrace were, certainly, non-Hellenic; so much so, that it is only by first peopling them with Pelasgi, and then making the Pelasgi what may be called Hellenoeid—or Greek-like—that the semblance of any close ethnological affinity with the true and undoubted Greeks of the Homeric confederacy can be obtained.

If we leave the continent and turn to the islands, the greater part of the Cyclades and Sporades are in the same predicament with Acarnania. In the “Catalogue of the Ships,” Crete, Rhodes, Syme, Carpathus, Cos, Nisuros, and the Calydnian Islands are alone named.

Such are the reasons for believing that the true and undoubted Hellenic area, was, at the time of the Homeric poems, quite small enough to have received the whole of its population from some other country, and that by means of boats and ships.

The two elements of the Hellenic population in its simplest form, are—1. The native; 2. The Italian; either of which may have been more or less mixed; though the proof of it is impracticable, and the analysis out of the question.

One of the tribes of the ancient Skipetar area was the Hylleis; and one of the Doric heroes was Hyllus. I connect these names, the latter being the eponymus to the former. When the Dorians conquer Peloponnesus, Hyllus assists them. This suggests the likelihood of those immigrants whose first settlements were on the northern side of the Saronic Gulf, and who from thence effected conquests southwards and elsewhere, having done so in alliance with certain members of the Illyrian, Epirote, or Skipetar stock. If so, the Dorian conquests were only partially Hellenic, so that there is, at least, an element of intermixture here.

Others are referable to the eastern coast. Asia Minor, Egypt, and Phœnicia all contributed to mix the Hellenic blood. In respect to Asia Minor we may relegate the account of the descent of Pelops on Peloponnesus to the region of unsatisfactory traditions, and still have a large amount of facts in favour of the infusion of Eastern blood from this quarter being considerable. These lie in the character of the islanders of the Ægean. Whatever else they may have been, they were partially Carian on one side, and partially Greek on the other.

The claims of Egypt to have contributed to the Greek stock have been closely criticized by Colonel Mure. His broad position, that the introduction of foreign settlers is generally followed by visible and definite influences on the language, is carried to, perhaps, an undue extent, since, to take an example from our own history, the effect of the Danes in England is by no means commensurate with their real importance as invaders. Or, perhaps, his views are limited to the criticism of a nation’s literature; in which case a foreign settlement, which gave nothing new to the speech of the people, to their arts, to their records, or to their mythology, would, to the historian of its literature, be no foreign settlement at all. The ethnologist is, to a certain degree, in the same position; but only to a certain degree. At any rate, however, the fact of an Egyptian element in the early Hellenic population is an important point in the ancient commerce of the Mediterranean, even if it be nothing more.

I admit the likelihood sagaciously suggested by Colonel Mure, of the parts between Syria and Egypt being, in reality, Semitic[11] rather than Egyptian, yet passing for Egyptian in the eyes of a Greek; so that much which is really Phœnician, or Jewish, may have been considered as Coptic. Nevertheless, a few fragmentary facts seem to indicate a true introduction of Egyptian ideas and blood.

a. The name of the city Thebæ, common to both Greece and Egypt, is one of these.

b. The reproach cast in the teeth of Achilles in respect to Penthesilea by Thersites, which can only be alluded to here, but which is explained in Herodotus[12] by a reference to Egyptian manners is another.

c. The word Barbaros, which the evidence of Herodotus, combined with the fact of the native name of the Africans immediately to the south of Egypt being Berber at the present moment, induces me to consider it as an absolute Egyptian word.

d. The word Africa is easily explained by supposing that the Egyptians took it from the Afer nations of Abyssinia, and so gave it the Greeks, but it is not explicable by deducing it from a Semitic source.

e. The names Iolchos and Colchis.—How comes Jason, in sailing from a part of Thessaly named Iolchos, to reach a part of Asia with a name all but identical? or, changing the expression, how comes the Colchos of the Black Sea which Jason visits, to have had a name so like that of the birthplace of the hero who visits it? These things, however little they may be set down to the chapter of accidents, are rarely accidental. Yet they cannot be connected with each other. The evidence, however, of Herodotus to the existence of Egyptian customs in Colchis (evidence which, although it will not prove the identity of the Georgian stock with the Egyptian, suggests the idea of a partial settlement) supplies an explanation. Both Colchos and Iolchos may have been Egyptian.

Farther remarks upon the assumption that the Phœnicians only (and not the Egyptians) were a maritime people, will occur in the ethnology of Crete.

The influences from Syria and Palestine were either Phœnician or Jewish, and by no means exclusively Phœnician. The selling of the sons and daughters of Judah into captivity beyond the sea, is a fact attested by Isaiah. Neither do I think that the eponymus of the Argive Danai was other than that of the Israelite tribe of Dan; only we are so used to confine ourselves to the soil of Palestine in our consideration of the history of the Israelites, that we treat them as if they were adscripti glebœ, and ignore the share they may have taken in the ordinary history of the world. Like priests of great sanctity, they are known in the holy places only—yet the seaports between Tyre and Ascalon, of Dan, Ephraim, and Asher, must have followed the history of seaports in general, and not have stood on the coast for nothing. What a light would be thrown on the origin of the name Pelop-o-nesus, and the history of the Pelop-id family, if a bonâ fide nation of Pelopes, with unequivocal affinities, and cotemporary annals, had existed on the coast of Asia! Who would have hesitated to connect the two? Yet with the Danai and the tribe of Dan this is the case, and no one connects them.

In these remarks I by no means say that the resemblance is not accidental; although my opinion is against it being so. I only say that a conclusion which would have been suggested if the tribe of Dan had been Gentiles has been neglected because they were Jews.

That the alphabet and the weights and measures of Greece are Phœnician is likely enough; indeed, from the extent to which the habit of circumcision was strange to the Hellenes, the evidence is in favour of the coasts of Phœnicia, and the Philistine country having supplied a larger immigration than those of the Holy Land. In respect to the infusion itself of Semitic blood, whatever may have been the details of its origin, it was considerable; and has generally been admitted to have been so.

The absolute admixture of Thracian and Phrygian blood on the soil of Hellas, anterior to the Macedonian conquest, is a complex question.

If the Pelasgi belonged to either of these families, it was, of course, exceedingly great. But the ethnological position of the Pelasgi has yet to be considered. Even if they did not, an important question still stands over; since the influence of the Thracian bards and the Phrygian musicians, however much it has been either wholly or partially doubted by late writers, was admitted by the ancient Greeks themselves. Then there is the Trojan war, an event, which, however fabulous in its details, has some basis in fact. Lastly, there is the belief at the beginning of the historical period of the existence of Thracians in Bœotia. All, however, upon these points that is indicated at present is the caution against excluding Thracian blood from Hellas on the mere strength of its barbaric character. It is also added that, until the ethnology of Thrace has been dealt with, the evidence in favour of the Italian origin of the Greek language is incomplete.

The extent of the Hellenic area at the date of the Homeric “Catalogue of Ships,” has been given. The majority of the Ægean islands were, then, other than Greek. On the coasts, however, of Asia Minor portions of what was afterwards Ionia had been colonized. Teos, for instance, and Smyrna are mentioned by name; on the other hand, the division of the colonized portions into Æolia, Ionia, and Doris is unnoticed—probably it was unknown and non-existent. There are Dorians, however, in Crete. The Hellenes are simply a population of Thessaly, the Pelasgi allied to the Trojans, and circumscribed in area. Danaoi, Argeoi, and Achaioi are the nearest approaches to an equivalent to the subsequent term Hellenes.

From the Homeric age until the approach of the Persian war, our notices of the Hellenes are so nearly limited to the Greeks of Asia, that the state of Thessaly, Bœotia, Attica, and the Peloponnesus—European and Continental Greece—is obscure; Athens, however, and Sparta are the parts that then command notice; not Miletus, Smyrna, or Lesbos. Hellas, too, as a collective name, has been developed. On the coast of Asia there is an Æolis, a Doris, and an Ionia, all of which the Hellenes look upon as settlements from corresponding parts of Greece, and there is division of the Hellenes themselves, of considerable political importance, into two classes—the Dorian and Ionian. These differences between their own age and the Homeric, the great historians of the Golden Age of Greek literature explained as they best could. Are we bound to admit their explanation? Not for the Pelasgi, because we can get no definite doctrine at all concerning them. Nor yet, in my mind, for the Doric, Æolic, and Ionic migrations in their details. I cannot believe that the Ionic dialect ever came out of Greece; holding, that nothing but a most undue deference to authority and opinion can deduce it directly from any older form of the Attic. And this is but one objection out of many. Indeed I submit to the reader’s consideration the doctrine that the differences expressed by the terms in question, are best explained and accounted for by supposing, either—

1. A difference between the original Italian populations; or—

2. A difference in the elements which were supplied in Greece itself.

Thus—admixture and alliance with the original population of Thessaly and South Macedon, rather than with that of Epirus may have determined the Æolian character; admixture and alliance with the South Epirotes rather than the Thessalians, the Doric; Semitic elements the Ionic. In the first and last instances, there may also have been a different starting-point from Italy; the Ionians being derived from the coast that gave its name to the Ionian Sea, the Æolians from the district to which Æolus was the eponymus.

That such results as these, wearing, perhaps, the garb of paradoxes, are in strong contrast to the recognized doctrines of the best Greek historians is undoubted. No reader, however, should dismiss them until he has satisfied himself that he has discussed the question ethnologically as well as historically; until he has clearly seen the extent whereto the reasoning which the palæontological geologist applies to the antiquities of the earth’s crust (reasoning wholly independent of historical testimony) is applicable to the archæology of the human species also; and (lastly and most especially) until having fully appreciated the necessity of making the geographical and philological connections of the Latin and Greek languages coincide, he has experienced the difficulty of doing so in the face of the phenomena presented by the present distribution of the Skipetar, Dalmatian, Croatian, and other interjacent populations.

There is, then, a Greek language, a Greek literature, a Greek influence in literature; all beyond doubt. But there is no equally undoubted Greek stock. As far as there is such an entity, the speech is in Hellas, and the blood in Italy.

Up to a certain time the Hellenic influence has a northern direction, and acts upon certain populations originally barbarous, so as imperfectly to Hellenize them. Such is the case with Ætolia and Macedon. Afterwards, however, the direction of these influences changes, and Ætolia and Macedon contribute to dis-Hellenize (if so hybrid a word may be allowed) Greece. Before they do this, however, they have been taken out of the category of barbarism; just as would be the case if Anglo-Saxon England were reconquered by the half-Anglicized Ireland of the nineteenth century, and just as would not have been the case had it been conquered by the Ireland of Brian Ború. Rome, too, respected the land that she had reduced; so that the physical history of Greece remains but slightly altered until the period of the Gothic, Hun, and Slavonic invasions. And even Alaric but ravaged the soil and destroyed life. We nowhere find proofs of any introduction of Gothic blood. Nor yet of Hun. It is the Slavonic stock that has given Greece its greatest foreign element.

Why is it that when we compare a map of Modern with one of Ancient Greece, such a small proportion of the old classical names, either modified or unmodified in form, can be found? Such is, undoubtedly, the case. Yet subject to Turkey as Greece was until the present century, the majority of the new names is not Turkish. On the contrary, they are chiefly Slavonic. The language of the later Byzantine writers explains this.[13]

As early as the last quarter of the sixth century (A.D. 582), the movements set in towards Greece; Thrace and Macedon being overrun by Slavonians. The details here, however, are obscure, and there is an occasional confusion of the Slaves with the Avars. The latter nation, however, seems to have made no notable settlement in Southern Greece at least. In the latter half of the seventh century, Thessaly, Epirus, several of the islands, and parts of Asia Minor were overrun. In the ninth, Macedon is called Slavonia (Σκλαβἱνια). In the eleventh, Athens is sacked, and the inhabitants driven to take refuge in the isle of Salamis. Under Constantine Porphyrogeneta, the presence of an Hellenic population is an exception. “In Macedon,” he writes, “the Scythians dwell, instead of the Macedonians.” Again, “the whole country is Slavonized.”

But the most remarkable passage is the following, which shows that a Slavonic population is so far the rule that where an approach to the ancient population is found it is dealt with as a remarkable phenomenon; and that by a Greek writer:—“It must be known that the inhabitants of the settlement (κἁστρον) Maina, are not of the race of the aforesaid Slaves, but of the old Romans, and even till the present time, they are called by their neighbours Hellenes, from having been originally Pagans and idolatrers like the old Hellenes.”—De Adm. Imp. I. 50.

Latin writers, equally with the Greek, considered Greece to be Slavonic:—“Inde (i.e., Sicilia) navigantes venerunt ultra mare Adrium ad urbem Manafasiam in Sclavinica terra.”—From a Journal of St. Willibald, the writer of which, by Manafasia, means Napoli di Malvasia in the Morea.

More than this. The details of some of these Slavonic populations are given; so that we know that there were Ezeritæ and Milengi in the Morea, with Dragovitæ, Sagudatæ, Velegezetæ, Verzetæ, and others in Northern Greece.

In diminished numbers, the representatives of the old Laconians exist at the present time. A.D. 1573, they had fourteen, they have now but three, villages—Prasto, or the ancient Prasiæ, Kastanitza, and Silina. With the exception of their dialect, the Romaic of modern Hellas is said to be spoken with considerable uniformity over the whole of Greece.

Without investigating the difficult question as to the proportion of Slavonic elements, it may fairly be said that Ancient Greece is the area of a greatly, and Modern Greece that of an inordinately, mixed stock. To this mixture, Italians, Albanians, and other populations of modern Europe have added.

WITHOUT asking too minutely what are the real boundaries of Europe on its eastern side, we shall find it convenient to carry them as far as the Volga and the Ural Mountains; by doing which we include the Government of the Don Kosaks, Astrakan, Orenburg, Perm, Vologda, and the whole of Arkhangel. This is being inordinately liberal; but it is as well to be so, because three divisions of the population of European Russia are common to the two continents; and hence the history of more than one of the areas under consideration will be incomplete unless we trace its occupants to their original home on the other side of the Ural Mountains. One of these areas is the important country of Hungary; so far, at least, as it is possessed by the Asiatic Majiars.

The great primary divisions of the human species to which the population of European Russia is referable, are only two in number; but then each of them is a class of great extent and generality; falling into divisions and subdivisions. These are the Sarmatian and the Turanian; Sarmatian meaning the Slavonian and Lithuanian families collectively, and Turanian the Ugrian and Turk. A few months ago a third class would have been requisite, the Samoeid; in order to include the occupants of the Valley of the Lower Petshora and the coasts of the Arctic Sea, in the eastern parts of the government of Arkhangel. But it has been shown by Gabelentz, from an analysis of the Samoeid language that it belongs to the same class with the Fin, Lapp, Permian, Siranian, Votiak, and other Ugrian tongues.

The present distribution of the Ugrian populations is not only a point of importance for its own sake, but is an indispensable preliminary for the inquiry into the earlier ethnology of Russia.

The Lapp branch of the Ugrian stock is common to Russia and Scandinavia, so that it will be noticed again when Norway and Sweden come under consideration. It is chiefly in their dialect and creed that the two divisions differ; the imperfect Christianity of the Russian Lapps being that of the Greek Church, and their speech, although, I believe, intelligible to a Norwegian Lapp, being stamped with several well-marked peculiarities. It is the structure of their language that shows them to belong to the same stock as the Kwains of Finland, the difference of their complexion and stature being considerable; for the Lapp is dark-haired, dark-eyed, swarthy-skinned, under-sized, and weak-built, as is the Samoeid also. The Lapp chiefly occupies the country to the west, the Samoeid that to the east of the White Sea.

Finland is the country of a people whom it is best to call Kwains; since Kwain is the native name, and Fin is a term which, from being often applied to the Lapps of Finmark, creates confusion. If this designation be too strange, Finlander should be strictly adhered to. Viborg and Olonetz are parts of the Kwain area, with but little variation on the part of their occupants. St. Petersburg was a part of Finland until the time of Peter the Great, and Esthonia is Ugrian at the present time. No new inhabitants of Esthonia, but, on the contrary, its oldest occupants, the Rahwas, closely allied to the proper Finlanders of Finland, form the third section of the great Ugrian stock. Livonia, or Lief-land, takes its name from an Ugrian tribe, the Liefs, a tribe which from being pressed upon by the Lithuanians of Courland, is nearly extinct as a separate substantive population.

In Courland the most western Ugrians came in contact with the Lithuanians; not, as is reasonably believed, exactly on the banks of the Dwina, but within the Province; in other words, the ancient Ugrians of these parts extended over the whole of Livonia, and also a little beyond it. Courland, however, is, upon the whole, essentially a Lithuanic area.

In Vologda and Perm, two closely allied members of a fresh branch of Ugrians present themselves, the Siranians and the Permians; the latter greatly reduced and Russianized. Perm is bounded by the Ural Mountains, along the ridge of which are the Voguls, and, east of the Voguls, the Ostiaks of the Obi. But as these belong to Asia, it is sufficient to say that they are Ugrian. The Votiaks take their name from the river Viatka, as does the government they inhabit.

Kazan, Novgorod, Simbirsk, and Saratov, like Viatka and Perm, are truly Ugrian areas, though the intrusion of both Turk and Russian elements has left the original populations in a fragmentary state. They are represented, however, by the Tsheremiss, the Tshuvatsh and the Morduin; the Tshuvatsh being a problematical population from the extent to which their language presents a mixture of Turk elements, and the Morduins falling into three divisions—the Mokshad, the Ersad, and the Karatai. The absolute and undoubted area, then, of the Ugrians of Russia, as it exists at the present moment, notwithstanding encroachments from both the Turks of the east, and the Russians of the south and west, reaches as far south as the government of Saratov.

The present distribution of the Lithuanian populations, is second only in importance to that of the Ugrians. Livonia is the most convenient starting-point. Here it is spoken at present; though not aboriginal to the province. The Polish, German, and Russian languages have encroached on the Lithuanian, the Lithuanian on the Ugrian. It is the Lett branch of the Lithuanian which is spoken by the Letts of Livonia (Liefland) but not by the Liefs. The same is the case in Courland. East Prussia lies beyond the Russian empire, but it is not unnecessary to state that, as late as the sixteenth century, a Lithuanian tongue was spoken there. Vilna, Grodno, and Vitepsk are the proper Lithuanian provinces. There, the original proper Lithuanic tongue still survives; uncultivated, and day by day suffering from the encroachment of the Russian, but, withal, in the eyes of the ethnologist, the most important language in Europe.

The Tartar provinces come next, or, to speak more correctly, the Turk. Tartar, however, is the usual term, and as Tartary is the recognised name of the country to the east of the Caspian, it is not likely to be got rid of; nor yet to be changed into the more correct form Tahtah. The stock, however, is that to which the Ottoman Turks of Turkey, along with numerous other powerful and important populations, belong. Kasan, Oremberg, and Astrakhan are the chief Turk provinces. A portion, too, of New Russia is Turk. The date of their introduction is the thirteenth century; the empire to which they belonged being that of the successors of Zengis Khan.

The peculiarities of the distribution of the Turks of Russia is explained by their history. Of Southern Russia, as well as of the south-eastern provinces, they were once the exclusive masters. This makes the Russian population of Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, the Don Kosak country, and the greater part of Taurida, of recent origin; indeed, it is not only recent but mixed, and it is called New Russian.

Podolia, Kiev, Pultava, Kharkhov, are what is called Malorussian, or Little Russian. The dialect differs notably from that of the Muscovite of the central governments, and has its affinities in a different direction, since it very closely resembles the Russniak of Gallicia. And in Gallicia it probably originated. At the same time the three dialects, the Russniak, the Maloruss, and the Muscovite (or Great Russian) are mutually intelligible. Between these two branches of the Russian family a strong national antipathy exists.

In Volhynia the dialect is the White Russian, and so it is in those parts of Lithuania where the Lithuanian is out of use.

The true and proper Russian of Great Russia, or Muscovy, the language of the capitals, and the language which the conquests of Russia have extended over all Northern Asia, and even into North-western America, circumscribed, as it has been shown to be, by the languages and dialects which have just been enumerated, is still spoken over a vast area—over all the central provinces of Russia, as well as on the Baltic and the Euxine, at St. Petersburg and at Odessa. It is generally, too, the language of the towns. But, for a language of so vast an area, it falls into a remarkably small number of dialects. In Olonetz it is mixed with the Fin, since the Fin is the original language of that government; and, in Vladimir, the Suzdal dialect exhibits certain peculiarities; but, with these, and, perhaps, a few other exceptions, the uniformity is complete.

This is primâ facie evidence of its introduction being recent; a fact which the whole history of ancient Russia confirms; indeed, it is highly probable that no truly Slavonic nation (not even the Malorussians) occupied any portion of their present possessions anterior to the fourth century of the Christian era. If so, how was the area first filled? By the Lithuanians and the Ugrians; by the Lithuanians extending from the west eastwards, and by the Ugrians extending from the east westwards. By this hypothesis the two populations met in some of the central provinces, though it is difficult to fix the absolute points of contact.

Nor were the Slavonians even the first invaders who disturbed this distribution; since Turk populations different from and earlier than the Turks of the thirteenth century were settled in Southern Russia in the fifth century B.C., i.e., at the very beginning of the historical period. Neither do I press the absolute exclusion of stocks other than the Lithuanian and the Ugrian so strongly as to deny the likelihood of the aborigines of the Crimea and some of the neighbouring districts having been members of the same stock as the Circassians and the other tribes of Caucasus. Little, however, depends on this.

Upon the early exclusion of the Slavonians a great deal depends; a great deal affecting not only the ethnology of Russia itself, but that of the whole area, real or imaginary, of the Slavonic stock; that of the parts west of the Elbe, that of Bohemia and Dalmatia, that of Wallachia and Hungary, that of Northern Greece, that of North-eastern Italy, that of even the Tyrol, Bavaria, and Switzerland. And the original extent of the Lithuanic area is more important still. Armenian, Persian, and Indian archæology are involved in it. It is not difficult to see how this happens. There are vast tracts of country along the Elbe, the Oder, the Vistula, and the Danube that good authorities deny to have been originally Slavonic. “They were German,” it is said, “or if not German, Keltic, or, perhaps, they belonged to some extinct stock.” “If so,” it is reasonably asked, “whence came the Slavonians, and where is the cradle of so vast a family?”

A common answer is “Russia.” But what if Russia be Ugrian, or if not Ugrian, Lithuanic? Surely the question is important.

Then as to the Lithuanians. They and the Slavonians are branches of the same Sarmatian family; so, of course, their languages, though different, are allied. But next to the Slavonic what tongues are nearest the Lithuanic? Not the speech of the Fin, the German, or the Kelt, though these are the nearest in geography. The Latin is liker than any of these; but the likest of all is the ancient sacred language of India—the Sanskrit of the Vedas, Puranas, the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana. And what tongue is the nearest to the Sanskrit? Not those of Tibet and Armenia, not even those of Southern India. Its nearest parallel is the obscure and almost unlettered languages of Grodno, Wilna, Vitepsk, Courland, Livonia, and East Prussia. There is a difficult problem here; a problem which every fact which brings the Lithuanic and Sanskrit areas nearer to each other, advances towards its solution.

One of the presumptions in favour of the view in question has been noticed, viz., the uniformity of the Russian dialects. Another is derived from the fact of both the Lithuanians and Ugrians having suffered from the encroachment of the Russians ever since the beginning of the historical era. The advance has always been on one side. The Russ has pressed northward, westward, and eastward; the Ugrians and Lithuanians have retreated. But, better than mere presumptions there is evidence—historical and internal.

In Herodotus’s account of Scythia, the governments of Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, with parts of Kiev, Poltava, and Kharkhov, are occupied by a nation called the Skoloti. The informants of Herodotus, it is true, called them Scythæ, but Skolotoi was what they called themselves; and Skolotoi is the name that is most conveniently used when we wish to be specific. Their area coincides nearly with that of New Russia; nearly also with the Steppe district, as opposed to the fat black soils of the Middle Dneiper, if we consider it in respect to its physical geography. And this seems to determine the ethnology; since the Skoloti fall in two or more divisions, one nomadic, the other agricultural; the latter lying to the north of the former, just as is the case with the fertile lands as opposed to the bleak Steppes. The Royal Skoloti occupy the Crimea. The names of this family in detail are Alazones, Kallipidæ, Skythæ (Skoloti) Arotêres, Skythæ Georgi, and Skythæ Basileioi. But besides there is in the separate and disconnected population, viz., the Skythæ Apostantes, or the Seceding Skythians.

For the Skoloti a Slavonic origin has been claimed, and there is undoubtedly one decided fact in favour of their being so. But there is certainly no more. On the other hand, their Asiatic origin and their distribution connect them with the great Turk stock of Independent Tartary and a vast portion of Central Asia besides.

Furthermore, their eponymus is Targ-itaus, whose three sons are Leipoxais, Arpoxais, and Koloxais. The tradition concerning these as given by Herodotus is a tradition current among the Kherghis Turks at the present time. Lastly, the only word of the few glosses of the Skolotic language that can be explained by any known tongue in a plain straightforward manner, and without an undue amount of philological manipulation is the word oior=man, which is Turk throughout all the dialects of the Turk stock. The one decided fact in favour of a Sarmatian origin is the statement that certain Sauromatæ beyond the Don spoke the Skythian language. It should be added, however, that they spoke it with solecisms (σολοἱκοντες). Now it will readily be admitted that a Sarmatian population protruded as it were from the Lower Danube to the parts beyond the Donetz (Tanaïs), and thus isolated from its fellows, was just in the position to speak the language of the dominant occupants, and to speak it badly. Isolated, such Sarmatians undoubtedly were.

They were also mixed. The special statement of Herodotus is that they were descended, on one side, from the Skythæ of the country, on the other, from an invading body of Amazons. An explanation of this will be offered when the ethnology of Thrace comes under notice.

A second argument of far less value lies in the names of two Skoloti of rank—Aria-pithes, and Sparga-pithes. They are evidently compounds, whilst the latter name occurs in Persian, and the element -pith- (bed) in Armenian. This is a complication, since it suggests another class of affinities. Valeat quantum. The gloss oior, the descent from Targitaus, the legends of Koloxais, and the Asiatic origin stand against it. Besides which, a little ingenuity will explain away the root -pith. It may have been a title, as it actually is in Armenian, and, if so, a word belonging to the language of Herodotus’s informant, rather than to the Skolotic. Or the same class of Turk intrusions which introduced it into Europe, may have done the same in Persia; and this is not unlikely. It was just as much a proper name amongst the Massagetæ as it was amongst the Skoloti.

Turk invasion is the rule in Russia, and that of the Skoloti is the earliest on record. And it is in the very earliest records that it appears. The reasons for making it Turk have been considered; and it cannot have been Turk without having been comparatively recent. Consequently, there was a displacement of an earlier population, as is shown by the existence of an isolated population of Sauromatæ beyond the Donetz—in the country of the Don Kosaks.

But what are the reasons for supposing the Skolotic area of Herodotus to have been originally either Ugrian or Lithuanic, or, if not either exclusively, divided between the two? In the first place there are Ugrians as far south as the governments of Astrakhan and Simbirsk at the present moment; and that in situ, so to say, or in the position of indigenous occupants of their present localities rather than that of a newly introduced population. In the next place, there is more than one geographical term in the Skythian geography of the early writers which seems to belong to the Ugrian class of tongues; from which we may infer that, even if the informants of Herodotus did not take their geographical terms from the Ugrians themselves, they took them from a population with which the Ugrian area was conterminous.

1. The name Rhox-olani, occurring in Strabo, has long been considered Ugrian. No other class of languages forms the plural in -laine; several of the Ugrians do so.

2. The term Rhipæan, as applied to the Rhipæan Mountains, is Ugrian. Rhip=mountain in Ostiak.

3. The country of the Neuri was bounded by a lake, at the head of the river Tyras. There are certain geographical difficulties here, which this is no time to investigate. A swamp or fen is a more likely explanation. With this meaning, the word is Ugrian; and, at the present moment, the town of Narym in Siberia means, in Ostiak, the Fens.

Then comes the Lithuanian question; upon which the reasoning is far more elaborate; consisting chiefly in the exposition of an undoubted fact, and the suggestion of a new interpretation of it. No two parts of the world are so distant but what they may illustrate each other’s ethnology; and, in the present case, the ancient geography of Kherson and the Crimea is explained by that of Persia, Cabul, and Hindostan.

It has long been known that the ancient, sacred, and literary language of Northern India has its closest grammatical affinities in Europe. With none of the tongues of the neighbouring countries, with no form of the Tibetan of the Himalayas, of the Burmese dialects of the north-east, with no Tamul dialect of the southern part of the Peninsula itself, has it half such close resemblances as it has with a distant and disconnected language spoken on the Baltic—the Lithuanian.

As to the Lithuanian, it has, of course, its closest affinities with the Slavonic tongues of Russia, Bohemia, Poland, and Servia, since the Slavonic and Lithuanic are two branches of the same Sarmatian stock. But when we go beyond the Sarmatian stock, and bring into the field of comparison the other tongues of Europe, the Latin, the Greek, the German, and the Keltic, we find that, though the Lithuanic is more or less clearly connected with all of them, it is, beyond comparison, far liker the old Indian or Sanskrit.

Such is the undoubted fact, for which there are many doubtful explanations. Of these, the most unscientific is the most current.

1. The area of Asiatic languages in Asia allied to the Sanskrit is smaller than the area of European languages allied to the Lithuanic; and—

2. The class or genus to which the two tongues equally belong, is represented in Asia by the Sanskritic division only; whereas in Europe it falls into three divisions, each of, at least, equal value with the single Asiatic one—the Gothic, the Sarmatian, the Classical (Latin and Greek)—to which, if we extend the value of the term “Indo-European,” the Keltic may be added.

The botanist who, finding in Asia, extended over a comparatively small area, a single species, belonging to a genus which covered two-thirds of Europe, should pronounce the genus to be Asiatic, would be in the same position as an ethnologist who should derive the Indo-European stock of languages from India. Except so far as he might urge that everything came from the East, and so convert the specific question into an hypothesis as to the origin of vegetation in general, he would forfeit his character as a botanical logician. Neither would the zoologist who, mutatis mutandis, deduced the larger from the smaller, the complex from the simple, fare much better. Now it is a sad truth, that what no naturalist could attempt, philologists and ethnologists do with complacency; for so general is the acquiescence in the Eastern origin of the Indo-European tongues, that the possibility of every phenomenon connected with the Sanskrit and its allied dialects in Asia being explicable by means of a simple Sarmatian conquest from Southern Russia seems never to have been entertained.

The only part, however, of this complicated question which requires further consideration in a work like the present, is the necessity of bringing the Lithuanic and Indian areas as near each other as possible; a necessity which, by itself, justifies the assumption of a southward extension of the former. Hence, in addition to their present districts, the governments of Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev, Kherson, and the Taurida, are assigned to it. From these, either as indigenæ, or as the invaders of a country originally Ugrian, they conquered certain portions of Asia, just as the Majiars conquered Hungary, and just as the Greeks, some centuries later, conquered Hindostan. Their language was what afterwards became known as the Sanskrit, the Zend, the Persepolitan, and the Pali. Their occupancy ended when that of the Skoloti began; and it began some time anterior to the date of the earliest Sanskrit record. Such is the hypothesis; one which will, probably, find more favour with the naturalist than with the scholar. A subordinate reason for bringing the Lithuanians beyond their present area, will be given when the ethnology of Gallicia comes under notice.

Russian Poland.—When domestic faction and foreign intrigue succeeded in effecting the partition of the ancient and powerful kingdom of Poland, it disturbed a hitherto natural division, by dividing the Lekh division of the Slavonic branch of the Sarmatian stock between Russia, Austria, and Prussia.

Lekh is the name best suited for ethnological purposes, because it connects the modern kingdom of Poland with the country of the ancient and powerful Lygii, a name “widely spread over numerous states. It will be sufficient to name the most powerful, the Arii, the Manimi, the Helvecones, the Elysii, the Naharvali.”[14]

The religion of the first, and the warlike customs of the last of these nations, are noticed somewhat in detail; for the Naharvali celebrated certain rites within a holy grove, and with a priest in a woman’s dress. One of their deities was named Alcis; two others were the analogues of Castor and Pollux.

The fierce and powerful Arii stained their bodies, and with black shields chose the darkest nights for their terrible attacks.

That Tshekh and Lekh were the respective leaders of the Bohemians and Poles, is, with each nation, a native tradition. It is also under the name of Lekh that the latter are noticed by the oldest Slavonic historian—the monk Nestor.

The Naharvali were probably Lithuanians of East Prussia, rather than true Poles.

The Arii, according to the Lithuanic hypothesis of the Sanskrit language, may have been something much more important, viz., the Median Arii of the Asiatic invasion; in which case they were themselves either Lithuanian rather than Polish, or else (as is likely) the migration was Slavono-Lithuanic, instead of exclusively Lithuanic.

Upon the Lekh origin of the Helvecones, Manimi, and Elysii, there are no refinements.

Of the Polish area the eastern and northeastern parts seem to be the most recent, since, within the historical period, it has encroached upon that of the Lithuanians of Grodno and the Baltic provinces, and upon that of the Russniaks of Gallicia. In character, the language approaches the Tshekh of Bohemia, and the Sorabian of Lusatia and Saxony in the south and west. It was extended in the direction of the Elbe, as will be seen in the chapter on Prussia.

Unless it can be shown that the text of Tacitus is conclusive as to the Lygii having been Germans rather than what the name, place, and the belief of the Poles themselves suggest, the Poles of south-western Poland (at least) form the purest population which has been met with since we left the Basques; so that as far as it has been mixed at all, it has been through elements superadded to the original Lekh stock rather than through those of anything anterior to it. The Mongol invasions touched it; but that is all. The Roman and German conquests never reached it. Upon Russia, until the last century, it encroached. Hence, the elements of admixture that remain are Jewish, German, and others even less important still.

The language is a separate substantive tongue; the most cultivated of all the Slavonic forms of speech. From the Lithuanian it is broadly separated; less so from the Muscovite and Malorussian; but less still from the Bohemian and Sorabian.

A short analytical sketch of the component parts of the Russian populations will now be given.

The western half of the government of Arkhangel is Lapp, the eastern, Samoeid.

The Russian Lapps are all more or less Christianized. Reindeer and fish are their chief aliments, their habits being migratory.

Except in language, the Samoeid of the Arctic Circle differs but little from the Lapp, and even this difference has lately been shown to be less than was previously supposed. In manners they are somewhat ruder; whilst their Christianity is far more incomplete. Indeed, the old Shamanistic Paganism is their dominant religion. This they share with the Ostiaks, their neighbours on the south. But the most important fact connected with the Samoeids is their distribution and affinities. Along with populations more or less closely allied to them, they originally covered the whole of the vast region of Siberia; a region even at present occupied by them partially, and in detached localities, though the greater part of it is in possession of Mongol, Turk, and Tungusian populations—populations whose primary homes were in Central, rather than Northern Asia, but who have in all cases pressed northwards, and, in some, reached as far as the shores of the Arctic Sea. But as their occupation is incomplete, isolated fragments of the original populations still remain. Some of these are absolutely Samoeid, i.e., belonging to the same division of the same branch of the Ugrian stock. Others belong to different divisions. All, however, agree in speaking a language more akin to each other than to the Turks, Mongols, and Tungusians, by whom they are surrounded or separated.

The particular affinities of the Samoeids are with the Koibal, Kamash, and other tribes of Southern Siberia on the upper part of the Yenesey and on the very frontier of the Chinese empire.

Between these and the Samoeids of Arkhangel the population belongs to the class called Yeneseian. Now the language of the Yeneseians, though less like that of either of the Samoeid branches, than they are to each other, is still Ugrian rather than Turk, Mongol, or Tungusian. The same remark applies to a population as far east as the Kolyma, the Jukahiri. It is more Ugrian than Turk; yet the Yakut Turk of the Lena, rather than any Ugrian tongue, is the language with which it is in geographical contact. Lastly, it should be added that, according to a table of Ermann’s, the language of the Ugrian Ostiaks of the Obi, is more like that of the Kamskadales of Kamskatka than it is to the Turk tongues by which it is most immediately bounded. The inferences from all this are enormous extension and subsequent displacement of the Ugrian family.

The Lapps and Samoeids alone, of all the European populations, have been considered savages. They, too, only have been classed amongst the so-called inferior races. And it is undoubtedly true, that if we look to Europe alone, the line of demarcation which separates them from the Finlander (Ugrian as he is), and a fortiori from the Scandinavian and Slavonian is clear and trenchant. But Europe alone must not be looked to; neither must the Lapp and Samoeid be considered to cover the whole of their original area. Encroachment has taken place from the south, whereby the transitional varieties have become either extinct or amalgamate.

This is what we infer from the broken-up character of the Ugrian area in Siberia, as well as from the fact of the southern Samoeids, the Yeneseians, the Ostiaks, and several other populations being transitional in form and manner to the Ugrian of the Arctic and the Ugrian of the Southern, or Danubian, types.

The true Kwain of Finland, as contrasted with the Lapp, is light-haired, grey-eyed, and well-grown. The admixture of Swedish blood is considerable. A poem, approaching the character of the epic, and, at any rate, national and heroic, favourably represents the early capacity of the Kwain for appreciating song and music; and, in confirmation of the doctrine of a considerable displacement of the more southern members of the Lapp and Samoeid families, its subject is the conquest of Finland by the ancestors of its present occupants. The later civilizational influences are Swedish. So, too, is their Protestant and Lutheran Christianity. A sturdy tenacity of temper, combined with considerable bravery and power of endurance, has fairly been attributed to the Kwains. In Karelia the Swedish elements diminish. In Olonetz the Russian increase.

Of the government of St. Petersburg the original inhabitants were the Kwains of Ingria. In Esthonia the type changes. The population calls itself Rahwas, speaks a language akin to, but different from, the Kwain, a language, too, which from falling in, at least, two well-marked varieties, the Esthonian proper and the Esthonian of Dorpat, presents internal evidence of being no newly introduced form of speech, but, on the contrary, an old and original tongue.

In Livonia, or Lief-land, the oldest population was Lief; and the Liefs were Ugrians. A few only now remain. The first displacement was at the hands of the Lithuanian Letts, who are, at present, the chief population; themselves becoming, day by day, more and more Germanized—and, when not German, Slavonic.

Here, as in Finland, though in a less degree, there is a Swedish intermixture; indeed in one of the small islands of the Oesel Archipelago, the Isle of Worms, the population is Swede. In the Isle of Aaland it is Swedish, with a Ugrian basis.

Courland is Lithuanian, having once, in its eastern parts at least, been Ugrian; as was the whole of Liefland (Livonia). The river Salis runs across Liefland, and divides the northern half from the southern. This (there or thereabouts) constitutes the frontier. At Dorpat—which is a town of Liefland—the proper Esthonian changes its character, and so do several of the legends and traditions. Now, as the Dorpatians and the Liefs agree in those points wherein the Esthonians of the coast and Dorpatians differ, the following hypothesis has been suggested, viz.:—that when the Letts of Courland first pressed upon the Liefs of Livonia, these latter moved northwards towards Dorpat, then occupied by the typical Esthonians. These being displaced by the immigrant Liefs pressed the other Esthonians into South Finland.

Such displacements, however, of a population already settled and at peace, by some other weaker than itself, in consequence of aggressions from a third body of invaders, are commoner upon paper than in reality. The real fact seems to be that the country about Dorpat is intermediate in character to the Lief and Esthonian areas. From the mouth of the river Salis to Pabask, the present Liefs are the occupants of the sea-coast; probable descendants of the ancient Lemovii, the m being changed into v. That the -ov- is no part of the original word is shown by the forms Lami, and Lam-otina, Læm-onii, and Lam-methin. Nestor’s form more closely approaches the present, and is Lib’.

Judging from geographical names, as we find them on the common maps, Courland, as compared with Liefland, seems the more Germanized country of the two.

Courland and Liefland are the areas of the Lett, or Lettonian division of the Lithuanic stock; Vilna and Grodno are Proper Lithuanian—Lithuanian Proper and Samogitian. The later intrusions are from Poland. The Russian elements, too, of Vilna and Grodno have been Polonized; unless we prefer to say that the Pole elements have been Russianized. This means that when the language of Lithuania is neither the true Polish nor the true Lithuanic, it is what is called White Russian, a Poloniform dialect of the Russ. The geographical names in Vilna are easily distinguished from the Muscovite. The derivatives in -skaja, so common in St. Petersburg and Novogorod, are replaced by forms in -ichki.

The Lithuanian nations of the Jaczwingi and Pollexiani extended, at the beginning of the historical period, as far south as the Marsh of Pinsk, at the head-waters of the Pripecz, so that the northern part of Minsk was Lithuanic in the tenth century. All prolongations beyond this are ethnological rather than historical, i.e., they rest on inference rather than testimony.

The eastern part of Minsk, on the strength of the word Narym[15] is considered to have been Ugrian. The whole government is at present Russian, with (as is supposed) a Lithuanic and Ugrian basis; the Neuri, whether Ugrians, Lithuanians, or Ugro-Lithuanians having formed a portion of its oldest population.

Volhynia is considered to have been originally Lithuanic, for two reasons—the necessity of bringing down the early Lithuanic area as far in one direction as Gallicia, and as far in another as the Lower Don.

Podolia is Maloruss, or Russniak, its present population having been an extension of the Gallician Russniaks. It is considered to have been originally Lithuanic, from the necessity of bringing that area towards the Lower Don.

Kherson and Ekaterinoslav are eminently heterogeneous. Ugrian, perhaps, at first: they then became Lithuanic, then Skolotic, Hun, Avar, Alan, Khazar, Mongol, and Russian, not to mention recent colonies of Germans and Armenians. The extent to which the heterogeneous population of these parts differs from that of the more Slavonic governments of Russia, and approaches that of the true Turk areas is shown by the name Little Tartary, and New Russia, by which they are often designated.

Taurida is a study of itself. It may have been Ugrian at first. The points of resemblance between the ancient Tauri and Thracians of Thrace I refer to a common Sarmatian origin. But what does this mean? Sarmatian blood from the Lower Danube, or Sarmatian blood from Lithuania? or both? Then there were displacements effected by the tribes of Caucasus—Abasgi, in the classical times, Circassians under the Byzantine Empire. Then Greek colonies. Then Skolotic conquests. Then the other varieties of Turk occupancy. Besides this, comes that of the Goths of Lower Danube, and lastly, the Greeks of Byzantium, the Genoese of Kaffa, and the Mongols.

In Bessarabia, Turks and Moldavians are the predominant population. Divided between Getæ and Skoloti, at the beginning of the historical period, it has since had its full share of foreign invasion. The particular Turk population, however, is that of the Budziaks; such being the name of the so-called Tartars of Bessarabia. The date of their introduction is probably that of the Crimean Turks. Another variety consists in a more recent colony of Nogays, from the government of Astrakhan.

The Russians Proper, like those of New Russia, are the latest elements of all. Hence, the view of the Bessarabian population is that it is Turk on the eastern, and Moldavian on the western frontier, with Slavonic and German superadditions.

Kosak is a word which is now generally admitted to be of Turk origin. In its present signification it has a military or political rather than an ethnological sense. It means a horse-soldier owing military service to the Russian Empire.

His locality, his semi-feudal duties, and his blood, all vary. The Kosaks of the Don are chiefly Malorussian, with considerable Turk, some Circassian, and also some Mongol, intermixture.

But besides the true Kosak of the Don there is a Kalmuk colony in the country as well; an offset from the greater settlement on the Volga. These are true Mongols in manners, in physiognomy, and, to a great extent, in creed. They are also the most south-western members of the family to which they belong. Their introduction is recent; for it must be remembered that the so-called Mongol conquest of Russia, although effected by the successors of Zingis-Khan, was Turk rather than true Mongolian, the previously conquered Turks of Tartary and Siberia being the chief agents.

Voronej is the country of the ancient Budini and Geloni, the country of the forest rather than the steppe, both in the days of Herodotus and at the present time. The Geloni, I think, like the proper Skoloti, were Turks, intrusive upon a previously Ugrian population—a Ugrian population continued southwards from the governments of Penza, Simbirsk, and Saratov.

North and east of Tambov the original Ugrian population is no longer a matter of inference. In Penza the geographical names betray the recent occupancy of Ugrians of the Morduin branch. In Nizhni Novogorod, Simbirsk, and Kasan, the Morduins still exist; falling into three divisions, and speaking a peculiar language. On the Oka they call themselves Ersad, on the Sura Mokshad. In the neighbourhood of Kasan they are called by the Turks Karatai. Imperfectly Christianized they still retain much of their original Shamanism; are well-grown, in respect to size and stature, thin-bearded, and with brown rather than either black or flaxen hair. In A.D. 1837, their numbers were about 92,000.

The next Ugrian family in the same governments is that of the Tsheremiss, on the left bank of the Volga. Smaller in stature than the Morduins, they have but little beard, smooth skins, light hair, and flat faces. Imperfectly Christianized, and imperfectly agricultural: they still retain much of their original Paganism as well as of their nomadic habits. Their language belongs to the second class of Ugrian tongues spoken in these south-western portions of the Ugrian area. On the right bank of the Volga, and opposite the Tsheremiss are the Tshuvatsh also in the governments of Simbirsk, Kasan, and Saratov. Of the three families they are the most numerous, exceeding 300,000. Their hair is often black, and somewhat curly; and if the Morduin recede from the proper Ugrian type and approach the Slavonians, the Tshuvatsh do the same in respect to the Turks. Their language, too, contains an inordinate proportion of Turk words: indeed, by several good authorities, it has been considered an intermediate or transitional form of speech.

The Ugrians are the oldest occupants of the government of Kasan, the Turks the most numerous.

Of the same date with those of the Crimea, they represent the Mongol conquerors of the thirteenth century. Mixed in blood, Mahometan in creed, the Tartars of Kasan are “of middle stature and muscular, but not fat. Their heads are of an oval shape; their countenances of fresh complexion, and fine regular features; their eyes, mostly black, are small and lively; their noses arched and thin as well as their lips. Their hair is generally dark, and their teeth strong; their gesture full of dignity and grace. The same remarks apply to the females, but the expression of their countenances is lost through their manner of life, and the natural attractiveness of their persons is lessened by ornament and paint.”[16]

Their civilization is on a level with that of the Osmanli.

The Turk area extends eastwards, the Ugrian is continued north and north-west. The Udmart, or Udy of the river Viatka, are the Votiaks of the Russians and the Ari of the Turks, imperfect Christians, agriculturalists rather than nomades, and with more red-haired individuals amongst them than any other population. Eminently unmixed, they live not only in separate houses but in separate villages.

The Uralian range itself is the occupancy of the Vogul, and here the type changes. The flatness of feature increases; the stature diminishes; the habits are ruder. Hunting is the chief means of subsistence. Both in this respect and in language, the affinities of the Voguls are, with the Asiatic rather than the European Ugrians—the Ostiaks rather than the Permians.

The Votiaks, on the other hand, lead through the Permians and Siranians to the Finlanders. The former of these give their name to the government of Perm, the Biarmaland of the old Norse Sagas. They are now nearly Russianized; but tumuli, Arabic coins, an ancient alphabet, and an early Christianity, attest their capacity for civilization. The Siranians of the government of Vologda are closely allied to the Permians, and not very far removed from the Kwains.

Two other populations require notice. The Bashkirs of Orenburg deeply indent the southern part of Perm. Imperfect Mahometans, they speak Turkish, but depart widely in their physiognomy from the Turks of Kasan; so much so that Klaproth and others consider them to be Ugrians who have changed their language. They are, more probably, Ugrian on the mother’s side only, the Turks having intruded. During summer they wander either to hunt or to tend their herds and flocks; in winter they unwillingly fix themselves to some locality under the covert of a forest, and reside in houses. The Metsheriak, the Teptiar, and some other tribes, are Turks belonging to the same group. They belong, however, to Orenburg and Siberia rather than to European Russia.

The Ostiaks occupy part of the government of Perm, the part that lies beyond the Uralian range, and which is, consequently, Asiatic. They are hunters and fishers, less in size and more imperfectly Christianized than the Voguls. I believe them to have been the gold-keeping griffins (Gryphes) of Herodotus; though, to do this, the story of their relations to the Arimaspi must be supposed to have arisen in Armenia—no unlikely quarter, considering the probable line of the gold trade. A curious passage in Moses of Chorene tells us that the root Astyag, in the Old Armenian, signifies a dragon: and that Astyages, the Mede, was, in the eyes of an Armenian, Astyages Draco. Now, the locality of the Ostiaks is nearly that of the Uralian gold-mines, while just below them were the Tsheremiss, whose name in the mouths, first of a Skolotian and then of a Greek, might easily become Arimasp. The Greek could not pronounce the tsh; and as numerous Turkish words end in -asp, the -p might have been added on the principle which in English converts asparagus into sparrowgrass.

We have thus been brought round to the Finlanders of Finland.

With the reasons already given for considering the Russian in general to be a population of comparatively recent introduction, with the evidence in favour of the Skoloti having been intrusive Turks; and with the necessity of bringing the Lithuanians as far south as the Asiatic frontier, it is, surely, not too much to assert the doctrine that the original Russia was divided between two populations—one akin to the Permian, one to the Lithuanian. The line which divided them is, perhaps, an insoluble problem. Pskov and Smolensko, at least, may be given to the latter; Vladimir, Kostroma, Yaroslav, Moskow, and Tambov, to the former—Tula, Orlov, Koursk, Riazan, Tshernigov, Kharkhov, and Poltava, being left undistributed.

Further details respecting the Turk intrusions into Eastern Europe still stand over.

So do certain further questions respecting the Asiatic conquests of the Sarmatians.

They will be considered in the ethnology of Turkey.

The origin of the name Russ, however, requires a present notice. The word itself is Ugrian, but it became attached to the empire of Russia through the conquests of the Swedes. Certain Swedes, in the ninth century, having invaded the country of the (then) Ugrian Rhoxolani, extended their conquests so far southwards as to reach the Black Sea on the one side, and the Caspian on the other. They were objects of terror to the Byzantians; and in a curious passage of Constantine Porphyrogeneta we learn that the Falls of the Dnieper had two names, one Russ, and one Slavonic—Russ meaning Swedish or Norse. So that an undetermined amount of Swedish blood must be given to the Muscovite and Malorussian areas, as well as to the Baltic Provinces; and a time must be recognized when the word Russ meant the Norse conqueror of the parts on the Dnieper and Volga, in opposition to the conquered Slavonian. At the same time the Norse Russ was Russian only as an Anglo-Saxon of Kent was a Briton. He was a settler in the land of the older Slavonians and the still older Ugrian Rhoxolani.

Wallachia and Moldavia.—The Wallachians and Moldavians are in the same relations to the Romans and ancient Daci as the French are to the Romans and Kelts, or the Spaniards to the Romans and Iberians. Like the degenerate Greeks of the Byzantine empire, they call themselves Roman; and their language, like the Rumonsch of the Grisons and the Romaic of modern Hellas, is Romane.

As the two principalities represent only a portion of the ancient Dacia, the ethnological and political divisions differ; for, though all Wallachians and all Moldavians are Rumanyos the whole of the Rumanyos are not Wallachian and Moldavian. They are also indigenous to Transylvania and Bukhovinia. In Bulgaria, Thrace, and Macedonia, there are, probably, intruders. Light made, with dark skins, black eyes, and prominent features, they stand in strong contrast to both the Russians and the Slovaks, with which they are in geographical contact. Nor is it safe to refer this to Roman blood, since, according to Mr. Paget, the Dacians of Trajan’s column have similar features—at least as far as the profile goes, and as far as the description of a Transylvanian Rumanyo applies to those of Wallachia and Moldavia.

Of all the districts on the Danube, Wallachia and Moldavia have been the least disturbed during the last sixteen centuries. This, though it is saying but little for a country in the most afflicted part of Europe, is the inference from the continued existence of their language. Displaced in all the other Danubian provinces it is still the native tongue to upwards of 200,000 protected and half independent Rumanyi.

In detail, the ancient inhabitants of Wallachia were the Potulatensii, the Sensii, the Salrensii, the Kiageisi, and the Piephagi of Strabo.

In Moldavia, there had been a displacement as early as the time of Herodotus.

The Skoloti of Russia reached the Carpathians, inasmuch as they were conterminous with the Agathyrsi, and the Agathyrsi were on the Maros, i.e., in Transylvania.

Whether the Skoloti extended thus far westward, when Trajan conquered Decebalus is uncertain. I think that during the interval between the time of Herodotus and the Dacian war, the Skoloti had either retired or become amalgamated; so that the Dacian population lay in one large uniform mass from the Vallum Romanum in Hungary to the Solitude of the Getæ in Bessarabia. The reasons for this are drawn from the language.

1. This is uniform throughout, and uniformity of speech in the case of exotic languages, is primâ facie evidence of the uniformity in both the tongue which is introduced and the original tongue of the country. For identical fruits we must have like stocks as well as like grafts. The Roman in a Keltic country becomes French; in an Iberic, Spanish.

2. The terminations -ensii and -dava are common to the whole Dacian area—Predan-ensii, Rhatac-ensii, Alboc-ensii, Burid-ensii, Potulat-ensii, Satr-ensii, S-ensii, Cot-ensii, Cauco-ensii—Comi-dava, Perobori-dava, Rhami-dava, Neter-dava, Burri-dava, Argi-dava, &c.

Of the uniformity of language no country, of which the early history is equally obscure, shows stronger proofs than ancient Dacia.

The reasons for believing this to have been Sarmatian will be given in the sequel.

Tolerably pure, for a Danubian population, the Rumanyos of Wallachia are Romano-Slavonic. In Moldavia there is a trace of Turk (Skolotic) blood.

Servia.—Our divisions are political; so Servia, as an independent principality, must be dealt with by itself; and as, from their complexity, the Austrian and Ottoman empires are reserved for the last, it will be separated from the areas with which it is most immediately connected—Southern Hungary and Bosnia.

Bounded by the rivers Drin and Timoc, the present principality coincides nearly, though not quite, with the Roman Province of Mœsia Superior.

The valley of the Margus is the famous Plain of the Triballi (Τριβαλλἱκον πἑδιον; the mountains, those of the Macedonian, Illyrian, and Bulgarian frontiers.

There is the special evidence of Strabo that the Triballi and Mœsi were Thracians, and that the Thracians and Dacians spoke the same language. On the other hand, we learn from the same writer, that immediately to the west of the Triballi, the Thracian type ended and the Illyrian began. Without at present asking what this class may be, it is important to know that three such large groups are reducible to any single class at all. Neither is internal evidence wholly wanting for Upper Mœsia, the only portion of the Lower Danube now under notice. There is but a short list of geographical names: it contains, however, a Thermi-dava and a Pic-ensii.

We know almost as much of the wars of the Macedonians against the Triballi, as of those of the Romans against the Mœsi. Philip and Alexander each imperfectly reduced them. The reign of Augustus is signalized by the Dalmatian and Pannonian triumphs. Upper Mœsia was reduced at the same time.

Montenegro.—In the small Republic of Montenegro, of which the southern side is bounded by Albania, the population is Slavonic, differing from that of Bosnia and Hertzegovna only in being independent of the Porte, and Christian instead of Mahometan. The impracticable character of the country, and the martial spirit of its occupants, have preserved this single spot free from Turkish conquest. How far the blood is pure is doubtful: since the influence of the Roman conquest of Dalmatia, as well as that of the Greek settlements about Epidaurus is undetermined, neither is there any clear line of demarcation between the earliest ancestors of the Skipetar and the early ancestors of Slavonians in regard to their respective frontiers, north and south. It is probable, indeed, that the very earliest occupants of the Montenegro (Czernogora, or, Black Mountain) may have belonged to the former population; at present, however, the antipathy between the two nations is extreme; and in no part of the whole Slavonic area are the Slavonic characteristics more marked than in Montenegro.

AS a general rule the Germanic, or Gothic, stock has not only held its own area from the earliest time, but has encroached on that of others, so that although there are many parts of Europe, which, once the occupancy of non-Germanic populations, have now become more or less German, the converse rarely, if ever, can be shown to have taken place. Hence, almost all the districts which were originally German, are German now. The chief exception, if it be one, occurs in Belgium, where the Gallo-Roman family, has, perhaps, encroached on the Gothic.

But, though the Old Germany be Germanic still, there is a great part of the Modern Germany which was not so even at the beginning of the historical period. Some portion of the present area was Keltic, and a still greater was Sarmatian. Besides which, the original population of no inconsiderable section is uncertain. All this somewhat reduces the simplicity of the ethnology. And to this, it must be added, that the Teutonic (or German) branch of the great Gothic stock falls into some important divisions. The Frisians of Friesland represent one of these, our Anglo-Saxon ancestors another, the Old Saxons of Westphalia a third, the Low Dutch of Holland a fourth, the High Dutch of Bavaria a fifth, the Goths of the Old Ostrogoth and Visigoth conquests a sixth. Now the intestine movements of these different divisions have always been great; so that, although we shall rarely hear of any Germanic population having been overlaid by Slavonians or Kelts, the phenomenon of Saxons superseded by Low Dutch, Low Dutch by High and other similar displacements will be common.

The divisions, then, of the Germanic area are as follows:—

1st. There is the pure and proper country of the indigenous Germans, wherein all the important elements of admixture are limited to the different divisions and subdivisions of the Germanic family.

2nd. There is the area which was originally Sarmatian falling into—

a. The Lithuanic, and—

b. The Slavonic districts.

3rd. There is the tract which was originally Keltic.

4th. The parts whose original ethnology is uncertain.

The details of the different political divisions supply us with the commentary on this classification.

Prussia.—The kingdom of Prussia well illustrates the difficulty of making ethnology and politics agree. It falls into two parts separated from each other. Of these the first, with the possible exception of its south-western corner, was wholly Sarmatian in the tenth century; as Sarmatian as England was Keltic, or Spain Iberic. The population, too, was referable to both branches of the Sarmatian stock—the Slavonic as well as the Lithuanic.

In East Prussia it is easily seen that the geographical names are not German. Neither are they Russian. The Old Prussian, a member of the Lithuanic family of languages, was spoken here as late as the sixteenth century, remains of which, in the shape of a catechism, are extant. This is the language of the ancient Æstyi, or Men of the East, which Tacitus says was akin to the British, an error arising from the similarity of name, since a Slavonian (if such were the original source of his information) would call the two languages by names so like as Prytskaia and Brytskaia, and a German (if the authority were Germanic) by names so like as Pryttisc and Bryttisc. The Guttones, too, of Pliny, whose locality is fixed from the fact of their having been collectors of the amber of East Prussia and Courland, were of the same stock. The name by which they were known to the Slavonians within the historical period was Guddon=Gothones, Guttones.

In West Prussia the extermination or amalgamation of the native Lithuanians was earlier. We have no specimens of their language. We know, however, that the country took its name from them. They seem to have been the most western members of their family. The southern frontier of the present Prussia is Polish.

Prussian Poland—the Duchy of Posen—is now, as it always has been, Sarmatian, Slavonic, Lekh, Lygian.

Pomerania, too, retains vestiges of its Slavonic population in the Kaszeb, Kassubes, or Kassubitæ, occupants of the peninsula and islands at the mouth of the Oder. The name, too, of the province at large, is Slavonic; po=on+more=sea=coast-land.

The Isle of Rugen was one of the last strongholds of Slavonic Paganism, as is shown by its numerous antiquities, and by the evidence of history. The famous temple of the Obotrite Slavonians was there; though Mecklenburg rather than Pomerania was the part of the continent to which they belonged.

In Prussian Silesia, the Serskie of Lower and the Srbie of Upper Lusatia, still Slavonic, retain their language, and represented the older population of the whole country.

The Saale was the original boundary between the Germans and the Slaves, all between Thuringia and Poland belonging to that stock. Certain as this is from the accounts of the conquest under the Carlovingian empire, the details are difficult for Prussian Saxony, Altmark, and Brandenburg. The Hevelli were on the Hevel: the Stoderani, Brizani, Bethenici, Dossani, and Smeldingi filled up much of the valleys of the Oder and the Elbe: we cannot, however, fill up the whole tract. Yet, the names of the Marches, or Borders, show that the encroachment was gradual. First, and nearest to Germany, is the old march (Altmark); after this, the Middle march (Mittel mark); and then the March of the Ukrians (Uckermark), all originally frontiers between the encroaching Germans and the retiring Slavonians, and all frontiers within the historical period.

But Ucker-mark was a Border, or Debatable land in the eyes of the Slavonians, as well as their conquerors; and the name of its original occupants signified Borderers. The kr-is the kr-in U-krain-, as well as in the word Grenz, which, though German at present, is in origin, Slavonic. The form Uckri, Ucrani, and Uncrani, indicate this. Perhaps, though only perhaps, this Ukrian March—this Brandenburg Ukraine—may have separated the most western Lithuanians of Prussia from the Slavonians of the water-system of the Oder; if so, the word is an instrument of criticism, as it certainly is in many other interesting instances.

In part of the circle of Kotbus, the Sorabian of Silesia is still spoken.

The south-western districts of Prussia east of the Saale, Hesse, an outlying portion of Hanover, and Weimar, along with a narrow strip on the Brunswick frontier, are the only parts of the western half of the Proper Brandenburg Prussia that began with being Germanic; and even here there seems to have been intermixture. The Hanoverian frontier seems to have been wholly Slavonic.

Of Rhenish Prussia, Westphalia was originally Saxon—not exactly Angle or Anglo-Saxon, but slightly differing from the Anglo-Saxon in language. It was Old-Saxon. The Old-Saxon language, however, is extinct, and the blood considerably mixed. Encroachment and conquest of Low Dutch and High Dutch Germans from the South, in the ninth and tenth centuries, effected this. There were, also, a few Slavic colonies. Otherwise the blood is German; though neither wholly Dutch nor wholly Saxon. The old tribes of Westphalian Prussia were the Chamavi, Bructeri, and Angrivarii.

In Berg, Cleves, and the parts about Cologne, the Ubii, Tenchteri, Sicambri, and other allied tribes, were, probably, Dutch rather than Saxon, and Low Dutch rather than High. On the French frontier there is a Keltic basis; Cologne claims a notable amount of Roman blood.

Mecklenburg.—The great Slavonic nation of Mecklenburg was the Obotrites; after them the Wilzi, the Tollenzi, and the Rethrarii of the old pagan town of Rethre. The dukes of Mecklenburg alone, of all the numerous dynasts of Germany, are of Slavonic extraction.

Saxony.—Either conquered from Westphalian Saxony, or settled by Saxon colonies, the kingdom to which Dresden is the metropolis, originally the country of the Semnones, is German only in language. In blood it belongs to the same division with Silesia; indeed the Sorabian frontier (for so the Srbie, and Serskie may conveniently be called) extended as far westwards as the Saale.

Hanover.—From Hanover, the north-east quarter (there or thereabouts) must be deducted as Slavonic. Luneburg took its name from the Slavonic Linones, whose language was spoken in a few villages as late as the last century.

The remaining three-fourths are German; and from the extent of the kingdom and the irregularity of its outline, four out of the six divisions of the old Germanic populations may have been contained in it.

From the Ems to the Elbe, extended to an undetermined distance inland, the ancient tribes were the Chauci and Frisii, who were Frisians. Embden is the capital of East Friesland, where the Frisian language was general until the seventeenth century, and where, in one or two localities, it is still spoken at the present moment.

A line drawn from the Dutch district of Drenthe to the Hartz would pass through the country of the Old Saxons; one from Hamburg to Minden, through that of the Anglo-Saxons. The Longobardi, Chatti, and Cherusci, some portions of whom, whether High or Low, were Dutch, extended towards the Hartz. Soon after this the Slavonic area began.

Oldenburg.—Undoubtedly Frisian in its northern, Oldenburg was either Frisian or Old Saxon in its southern, parts.

Holland.—If the Dutch of Holland be the indigenous dialect of any part of that country, it is only so for the southern third of it. The Frisians are the oldest occupants.

Hesse-Cassel, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Nassau, the two former, the localities of the Chatti, take us from the Saxons and Frisians to the true Dutch or Germans. At present their language is High German. Probably, it was so at the beginning. I do not, however, pretend to say where the Low-Dutch form of speech originated. It has encroached upon the Frisian and Saxon; and, in all the parts where it is now spoken, with the exception, perhaps, of the parts below Cologne, is of foreign origin. On the other hand, however, the High German of Franconia, Suabia, and Bavaria has encroached on it.

Weimar, Gotha, Saxe-Meiningen, Schwartzburg, Coburg, and the south-western corner of Prussia, are considered to form the area of the ancestors of those Germans who, in the second, third, and fourth centuries played so conspicuous a part on the Lower Danube, under Alaric, Theodoric, and others. The following is submitted as a sketch of their history. As the Hermunduri of the country in which the Albis (the Saale rather than the Bohemian Elbe) rises, they are known to Tacitus; but their power, as elements of the great empire of Maroboduus has been felt by the Romans of Rhætia and Vindelicia nearly a century earlier. Encroaching southwards, and crossing the watershed of the Elbe and Danube (the Fichtelgebirge) they displace the probably Slavonic occupants of the valley of the Naab; press on further both southwards and eastwards; form, along their line, with the nations to the north, a March, but not of a character so hostile as to exclude the formation of confederacies formidable to Rome, under the name of Marcomanni; make their permanent settlements on the northern side of the Lower Danube; harass the Roman provinces, Thrace and Mœsia, until, themselves harassed by the Huns, they cross the Danube and effect settlements in Mœsia, where they become Arian Christians, and read the Gospel of Ulphilas, in their native tongue. Portions retrace their steps, still marking their way by conquest. Ataulphus in Gaul, Wallia in Spain, Theodoric in the Italy of the sixth, and Alaric in the Italy of the fifth century, all having been Goths of this division. They leave Germany as Grutungs and Thervings (Thuringians), become Marcomanni along the Bohemian and Moravian frontiers, Goths,[17] Ostrogoths and Visigoths, on the Lower Danube (or the land of the Getæ), and Mœsogoths (from the locality in which they became Christian) in Mœsia.

Wurtemburg, Baden, and Hohenzollern coincide with the Agri Decumates of the Roman writers. The original inhabitants, I believe, to have been Slaves and Kelts; then Kelts more exclusively (the Gauls of the western bank of the Rhine having encroached); then a heterogeneous mass of Gauls, Boii, Suevi, and Vindelicians, occupying a sort of Debatable Land between the Roman and non-Roman areas; lastly Alemanni and Suevi, the latter being Germans, the former a mixture of populations with the Germanic element preponderating. From these are descended the present occupants.

Bavaria, like Prussia, falls into two divisions; the Bavaria of the Rhine, and the Bavaria of the Danube. In Rhenish Bavaria the descent is from the ancient Vangiones and Nemetes, either Germanized Gauls, or Gallicized Germans, with Roman superadditions. Afterwards, an extension of the Alemannic and Suevic populations from the right bank of the Upper Rhine completes the evolution of their present Germanic character.

Danubian Bavaria falls into two subdivisions.

North of the Danube the valley of the Naab, at least, was originally Slavonic, containing an extension of the Slavonic population of Bohemia. But disturbance and displacement began early. The Thervings and Grutungs from the north of the Fichtelgebirge made their way to the Danube along these lines.

In the third and fourth centuries, the Suevi and Alemanni extended themselves from the upper Rhine.

The western parts of Bavaria, on the Wurtemburg frontier, perhaps as Slavonic as the valley of the Naab, differ, in their subsequent history, by having witnessed displacements from the south and west, from the Helvetians of Switzerland, and the Boii of Gaul, rather than from the Germans on the north. The later changes are the same in both cases.

The north-western parts of Bavaria were probably German from the beginning.

South of the Danube the ethnology changes. In the first place the Roman elements increase; since Vindelicia was a Roman Province. What, however, was the original basis? Probably, Slavonic on its eastern, Helvetian or Keltic on the western side. Its present character has arisen from an extension of the Germans of the upper Rhine.

AS the ethnology of the British Islands is made the subject of a separate volume,[18] the present notice will be confined to the simple statement of the Irish, the Scotch Gaels, the Manksmen, and the Welsh being Kelts, and the English, Germans; the Keltic populations being indigenous, the German, intrusive.

Scandinavia comes next in order, the arrangement being strictly natural; since, whatever may have been the original population of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, the present is of Germanic origin, and speaks a language belonging to the great Gothic class; the Danish and Swedish being mutually intelligible.

The Islands.—The Danish Islands fall into two groups, one containing the Isle of Fyen, the other the ancient Vithesleth, or the four islands of Sealand, Laaland, Moen, and Falster. This division is ancient, and in the eyes of some of the older writers of considerable import; since the true country of Dan, the eponymus of the Danes, was not Jutland, not yet Skaane (the southern part of Sweden), nor yet Fyen. It was the Four Islands of the Vithesleth:—“Dan—rex primo super Sialandiam, Monam, Falstriam, et Lalandiam, cujus regnum dicebatur Vithesleth. Deinde super alias provincias et insulas et totum regnum.”—Petri Olai Chron. Regum Daniæ. Also, “Vidit autem Dan regionem suam, super quam regnavit, Jutiam, Fioniam, Withesleth, Scaniam, quod esset bona.”—Annal. Esrom. p. 224.

That this word Vithesleth is a compound, that its first element is a Gentile name, and that the population which bore it was other than the modern Danes will be suggested in the sequel. At present it is enough to remember that the existing population of the four eastern islands is Germanic on a hitherto unvestigated basis. The men of the Vith-es-leth it is convenient to call Vitæ.

In Fyen the Gothic elements are the same as in the Vithesleth, the differentiæ consisting in the difference of the original basis, provided that such existed. This may or may not have been the case; since it by no means follows that because the islands of the Vithesleth differed from Fyen, that difference was ethnological. It may have been only political.

Lauenburg.—In the tenth century Lauenburg is Slavonic; its occupants being a population called Po-labi; called also Po-lab-ingii. As po means on, and Laba is the Slavonic form for the Elbe, the name is a compound, like Pomerania (on the sea). The Polabi, then, were the Slavonians of the Elbe. They were an extreme population; since the river Bille divided them from the Germans of Stormar, Holstein, and Ditmarsh. But though the Polabi of Lauenburg were a frontier population they were not isolated. They were in geographical continuity with the Linones of Luneburg, and the Obotrites of Mecklenburg. Reduced by the Carlovingian Franks, Lauenburg became Low German; as it is at the present time.

Holstein.—The name of the duchy is German, and derived from a German population—the Holsati. But the Holsati were neither the only occupants, nor the only Germans of these parts. The Stormarii of Stormar, and the Dietmarsi of Ditmarsh are equally mentioned by the writers of the eighth century. Earlier still we hear of the Sabalingii and Sigulones. The Holsati, Dietmarsi, and Stormarii, were either Angles or Frisians.

So much for the western half of the duchy. The eastern was Slavonic; even as Lauenburg was Slavonic, the particular population being that of the Wagri. They are a frontier population; and this may, possibly, be denoted by the name, which contains the same elements as that of the Ucri of Uckermark, and the Malorussians of the Ukraine.

Sleswick.—With Slavonians on the Baltic, and Frisians on the Atlantic, the original ethnology of Sleswick seems to have been that of the sister duchy. In Sleswick, however, the Frisian population still exists, extended from Husum to Tondern. In Sleswick also we have a portion of the Jute population of Jutland.

Jutland.—If the combination, J+t as it occurs in the word Jute, being the same as the G+t in Got, or Goth, we have a reason in favour of one of its earlier populations having been Lithuanic.

Then we have the Slavonians of Holstein and Sleswick to the south. How far these extended northwards is uncertain. Between the two, however, I believe that eastern Jutland, at least, was Sarmatian before it was German.

The next elements were Frisian; since traces of the Frisian occupancy are found as far north as the Liimfjord—and beyond it.

The present language is Danish.

Originally the area of the non-Germanic Jutæ, Jutland, took its first Germanic population from the Frisian area, its second from that of the early Scandinavians. Where this was, and what the Jutæ were, however, are complex questions which will be noticed towards the end of the chapter.

Iceland.—The Icelanders are one of the purest populations in the world. Foreign elements arising out of the admixture of any population antecedent to the present there are none. Foreign elements in the original stock are but few; since it was from Norway and not from Denmark that, in the ninth century, the island was peopled; and the Norwegians are the purest portion of the Scandinavian stock. As a general rule, the islanders are somewhat taller than the Norsemen of the continent. In the other external points of appearance they are similar. But an observation of Dr. Schleisner’s respecting their animal heat is important. “The internal warmth of the human body is between 36.50° and 37° centigrade, and this passes for being the general temperature in all latitudes, and in all climates, for all human beings, except new-born children. But with a very delicate thermometer, well-fitted for the purpose and which had previously been tried by other excellent instruments, I have found from experiments on twelve healthy individuals that the temperature within the cavity of the mouth was as follows:—

As far as this differs from that of the Norwegians—a point upon which our information is so incomplete as to make the previous table suggestive rather than conclusive—the difference must be put down to climate and similar external influences, rather than to that of what is called race.

The Icelandic language has altered so little within the last one thousand years that it is nearly the same as that of the old Sagas and poems; Sagas and poems which every Icelander can read. On the other hand, the change on the continent has been so great that no modern dialect of Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, is intelligible to an Icelander. Neither is any dialect that of the old Scandinavian literature.

Feroe Isles.—Here the population is from Norway, as pure as that of Iceland; and the form of speech is Icelandic also. The popular songs of the Feroe Islanders have drawn considerable attention, and been well illustrated. They read the critic a lesson of caution, in showing the extent to which a foreign subject may be thoroughly naturalized; so much so as to wear the appearance of being indigenous. Yet the subjects are those of the Nibelungen-Lied, and, as such, continental in their origin; in their immediate origin, Scandinavian, in their remote origin, German.

Norway.—The population of Norway is essentially Lapp and Norwegian, with the addition of a few Kwain settlements.

The Norwegian calls the Lapplander a Fin, so that the district or march of the Lapp population of Norway is called Fin-mark. But it is found considerably southwards as well.

The following table shows the distribution of the Fin (Lapp) population of Norway in 1724, 1845, and four intermediate periods:—

No census was taken for the years and districts to which no number is assigned. The table, however, invalidates the current notion that all the so-called savage races are in a state of decrease.

In the copper districts of the north of Norway there is a considerable number of Kwain settlers, chiefly employed as steady and industrious labourers in the mines. There is also a Kwain colony in the districts of Soloers called Finskoven (the Fin Wood) in the southern part of Norway and on the frontier of Sweden.

The rest of the population is of the same Germanic origin as the Danes and Swedes; though purer than either. The recent and superadded elements are but few, German being the chief; and Bergen and Christiania being the towns where they are commonest. Of the Danish elements no account is taken; the two populations being so closely allied. Jewish blood is non-existent; owing to rigorous laws of exclusion, ill-assorted with the liberal constitution of the most republican government in Europe.

A Lapp population common to Russia and Norway is common to Sweden also; the districts in the last-named countries being called Lap-mark, and the population Lapps.

Populations more or less allied to the Lapps, covering the southward extension of the present Lapp area were originally the native population of both Sweden and Norway. This is generally admitted. So it is that the present Germanic populations are not aboriginal.

That the Swedes and Norwegians are the newest elements, and that certain Ugrians were the oldest, is undoubted. But it by no means follows that the succession was simple. Between the first and last there may have been any amount of intercalations. Was this the case? My own opinion is, that the first encroachments upon the originally Ugrian area of Scandinavia were not from the south-west, but from the south-east, not from Hanover but from Prussia and Courland, not German but Lithuanic, and (as a practical proof of the inconvenience of the present nomenclature) although not German, Gothic.

Sweden to the south of the Malar-See is called Goth-land. The opposite coast of Prussia and Courland was the land of the Gutt-ones, Goth-ones, or Gyth-ones; in the eyes of a German and in the German language, a Goth-land also. An island in the Baltic, midway, is called Goth-land as well. What is the natural inference from this? Surely, the close relationship of the three populations.

When the main argument rests upon some single fact of primary weight or importance, a single fact to which nothing of equal magnitude can be opposed, the neglect of subordinate details is excusable—at least, in a short work. If they come spontaneously, and are of a satisfactory character—well and good. They are no part of the leading argument.

In some cases, perhaps, it should be a matter of principle to abstain from them; for example, when the leading argument, although good in itself, is liable, either from its novelty or from the amount of previous opinions which it contradicts, to be undervalued. In such a case, the display of subsidiary minutiæ subtracts from its weight. They make it look weaker than it is; weak enough to require all the support that the skill of its author can devise. In deducing the Greeks from Italy, the relations between the Greek and Latin tongues, the great difficulty of explaining them otherwise than by a geographical continuity, and the equal difficulty of effecting this continuity by any of the ordinary means formed the palmary argument. Such details as fell in with this view were put down to gain (apposita lucro). They were also good against similar details on the opposite side. But they were ex abundanti—at least in the first instance. To have neglected them altogether would not have been too bold. To have paraded them unnecessarily would have subtracted from the value of the real argument.

A comparative depreciation of subsidiary details appears in the present question; wherein it is held that certain members of the Lithuanian family extended their area across the Baltic into parts of Scandinavia, and peopled the southern provinces of Sweden. These were the Goths of Gothland, the Jutes of Jutland, the Vites of Withesleth, the old name of the Danish islands, anterior to their occupation by the Danes. The critic who doubts whether the names are the same as that of the Goths, on the strength of the difference of form, is free to do so; but by doing so, he will only impugn a part of the present doctrine. That the Goths of Gothland are the Gothones, Guttones, or Gythini of the opposite coast of Prussia and Courland is the important inference; and that the appearance of identical or similar names on the opposite coasts of an inland sea of no considerable breadth is a phenomenon which, until it can be explained otherwise, must be presumed to denote ethnological affinity is the principle which supports it. Whether the Gothones of Courland were really and truly Lithuanian is a point upon which there may be a difference of opinion; but there should be no difference of opinion as to the explanation of the presence of Goths in the opposite country of Gothland. The common-sense view of the matter, and the ordinary habits of interpretation should take their course.

This may be admitted, and yet an objection be taken to the effect that the Goths of the southern Gothland (the Goth-ones, Gyth-ini, Gutt-ones) were not Lithuanic but German. The primary argument on this point lies in the undoubted fact of the Goths of the Lower Danube, in the third and fourth centuries, being German.

But this primary argument is considerably invalidated by the fact, too often overlooked, of those Germans having been known under the name of Goths only when they have settled in the country of the Getæ and Gaudæ, a fact which makes the name just as foreign to the Teutonic dialects as Briton was to the Anglo-Saxon. From which it follows that all other populations which were, in respect to their name, in the same predicament as the Goths of Alaric and Theodoric, were connected not with the German invaders, but with the occupants of the country invaded; just as the Bretons of Brittany are connected not with such Englishmen as call themselves patriotically and poetically “Britons,” but with the Welsh representatives of the original occupants of the Keltic island Britannia. Now the populations thus linked together by some such name as G-th, G-t, J-t,[21] and V-t (all of which have been admitted to be but different forms of the same word) are numerous; three of them being now before us.

The real Goths, like the real Britons, were something very different from their German conquerors.

But the Gothic historian Jornandes, deduces the Goths of the Danube first from the southern coasts of the Baltic, and ultimately from Scandinavia. I think, however, that whoever reads his notices will be satisfied that he has fallen into the same confusion in respect to the Germans of the Lower Danube and the Getæ whose country they settled in, as an English writer would do who should adapt the legends of Geoffroy of Monmouth respecting the British kings to the genealogies of Ecbert and Alfred or to the origin of the warriors under Hengist. The legends of the soil and the legends of its invaders have been mixed together.

Nor is such confusion unnatural. The real facts before the historian were remarkable. There were Goths on the Lower Danube, Germanic in blood, but not Germanic in name; the name being that of the older inhabitants of the country. There were Gothones, or Guttones, in the Baltic, the essential part of whose name was Goth-; the -n- being, probably, and almost certainly, an inflexion.

Thirdly, there were Goths in Scandinavia, and Goths in an intermediate island of the Baltic. With such a series of Goth-lands, the single error of mistaking the old Getic legends for those of the more recent Germans (now called Goths), would easily engender others; and the most distant of the three Gothic areas would naturally pass for being the oldest also. Hence, the deduction of the Goths of the Danube from the Scandinavian Gothland.

The exception, then, to the Lithuanic origin of the Gothlander, which lies in the application of the name Goth to a population undoubtedly Germanic, is itself exceptionable; and the common-sense interpretation of the existence of similarly designated populations on the opposite coasts of an inland sea must take its course.

The exact degree to which Jornandes confounded the German invaders with the original Goths is uncertain. Some of his facts are unequivocally Getic, as his notice of Zamolxis. Others are as truly Germanic. The name Hermanric is this.

Each, however, is an extreme instance, and it is only at its extremities that the question is easy. In my own mind, I think that Getic legends and Getic history is the rule, Germanic the exception; in other words, that the so-called Gothic history is the history of the indigenæ rather than that of the invaders of the soil. It is even likely that Hermanric’s empire was German only as the present Austrian empire is German, i.e., German in respect to its chief. Zengis-Khan’s was Mongolian in the same way, the mass of his subjects and major part of his area being Turk. What leads to this is the likelihood of even the names of the royal families amongst the Ostrogoths and Visigoths—Amalung and Baltung—being Lithuanic. They have every appearance of having arisen out of eponymias. At any rate it is a strange coincidence to find one of the localities of the amber-district called sometimes Abalus, and sometimes Baltia—the latter name being connected with the Belt and Baltic. Pliny (writes Prichard) “in giving an account of the production of amber says, that, according to Pytheas, there was an estuary of the ocean called Mentonomon, inhabited by the Guttones, a people of Germany. It reached six thousand furlongs in extent. From this place an island named Abalus was distant about one day’s sail, on the shore of which the waves throw up pieces of amber. The inhabitants make use of it for fuel, or else sell it to their neighbours the Teutones.” Pliny says that Timæus gave full credit to this story, but that “he called the island not Abalus, but Baltia.”

Out of this Abal-, and this Balt-, I believe the eponymic names of Abal-ung (Amal-ung and Balt-ung) grew, just as Hellen did out of Hellas. And that they were other than German is shown by Tacitus, since the amber country was the country of the Æstyii, whose language was Britannicæ proprior—Britannicæ meaning Prussian, as I have shown elsewhere.

In bringing within the same class all the population denominated Gothini, Gothones, Guttones, Gothi, Gautæ, Gaudæ, Getæ, Jutæ, and Vitæ, I only do what nine out of ten of my predecessors have done before me. I differ, however, from them in determining the character of the class by that of the Guttones of the amber country, instead of that of the Goths of Alaric and Theodoric—these last being Goths only as the English are Britons, or the Spaniards, Mexicans. At the same time I am fully aware that any evidence whatever showing that the Germans of the Lower Danube were called Goths anterior to their arrival in the land of the Getæ, would shake my doctrine, and that unexceptionable evidence would throw it to the ground altogether.

The theory of the Scandinavian populations is different for the three different kingdoms.

1. Norway.—Norway agrees with Sweden in the likelihood of its earliest population having been Ugrian—Ugrian of the Lapp type, and continued southwards from Lapland or Finmark. Upon these the ancestors of the present Norwegians encroached.

2. Sweden.—In Norway the Germanic population came in immediate contact with the Ugrian; in Sweden it was, to a great extent, preceded by one from Courland and Prussia—the Goths. Hence, the ethnological elements in Sweden are one degree more complex.

3. Denmark.—Denmark differs from both Norway and Sweden in respect to its primary population; inasmuch as it is bounded on the north by the sea, so that its relations to the Ugrian area of the aboriginal Scandinavia are those of an island.

Does this prevent us from assuming a continuity of population? I cannot say. Although the north of Jutland is separated by a considerable breadth of water from the south of Scandinavia, Sealand is within sight of the southwestern coast of Sweden, and the south-western population of Sweden might easily have been extended into Denmark. On the other hand, however, the population which occupied the neck of the Chersonesus may with equal, if not greater reason, be considered to have been continued northward. But this population is itself complex, for instead of belonging to a single stock, we find, at the beginning of the historical period, Germans on the western, and Slavonians on the eastern half of Holstein. Which of these populations was continued into the Cimbric Chersonese? Or was there a third stock different from either? Or did each fill up a portion of the area, and if so, in what proportions? My own opinion in respect to these complexities is, that originally the southern half (at least) of the Cimbric Chersonese was Slavonic, even as the Mecklenburg and Lauenburg frontiers were Slavonic; and that, subsequently, a twofold displacement set-in—the Vitæ having invaded the islands and the north-eastern parts of Jutland from Prussia and Courland by sea, and the Frisians having pressed forwards from the Lower Elbe by land. Still, it would be hazardous to assert, that, during those primitive periods, when the whole of Norway and Sweden were Ugrian—as they, once, unquestionably were—the Danish Isles and the Cimbric Chersonese were not Ugrian also. It would be hazardous even to pronounce that the whole of the southern coast of the Baltic was not Ugrian also—since both the Slavonic populations of Mecklenburg and Pomerania, and the Lithuanians of Prussia and Courland belonged to the encroaching divisions of our species. That a Ugrian population extended as far southward and westward as the Elbe is a doctrine that may be maintained without going to the full recognition of the so-called Finnic hypothesis; which carries the populations akin to the Ugrian as far south as the Pyrenees, and sees in the Basques of Biscay and the Lapps of Lapland, the fragments of a vast population once continuous, but, subsequently, broken up and displaced by the Keltic and Germanic occupancies of Gaul and Germany respectively.

The history of the present Scandinavians, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians—must be considered in respect to (1) the line of conquest; (2) the date of the invasion; (3) the amount of foreign blood introduced.

1. Ptolemy’s notice of Scandia is, that “the western parts are occupied by the Chadeinoi, the eastern by the Phauonai and Phiræsoi, the southern by the Gautæ and Daukiônes, the middle by the Leuônoi.”—Lib. 11. ii. 33. We are not in the habit of considering these Phiræsoi to be Frisii, yet it would be difficult to give a reason against doing so. The Frisian occupancy of Jutland, at an early period, is undoubted, and it is equally undoubted that, of all the German dialects, the Frisian is the likest to the Scandinavian.

It is on the eastern side of Norway that these Phiræsoi must be placed, probably to the south of the Miösen, where they came in contact with the Chad-einoi of Hede-marken. There is a little forcing of the geography here. The Goths were, at the same time, in possession of the south of Sweden. These Goths seem to have been harder to reduce than the Ugrians, so that the line of the Frisian (Phiræsian) conquest ran, at first, from south to north, but afterwards changed its direction, and effected the reduction of the parts between the southern border of Lapland and the Malar Lake; the Goths of Gothland being the last to be reduced.

What justifies these details? The Goths of Gothland have already been considered. They reached as far as the parts about Stockholm. Now, North of these come the men of the South, i.e., of Suder-mannaland, or Suder-mania; a name which is explained if we make them the most southern of the invaders from Norway, but not easily explicable otherwise. This is the case of our own county of Suther-land repeated; which was the most southern part of Norway, though the most northern part of Britain. Further details of distribution are necessary to account for the name of the province of Westmannaland nearly, but not quite, on the eastern coast of Sweden. The district between it and the sea was reduced first.

2. The date must have been earlier than the time of Ptolemy; indeed, early enough to allow for the development of the differences between the Norse and Frisian languages. Reasons for believing that this requires no inordinate length of time I have given elsewhere.[22]

3. The intermixture of blood, and, consequently, the purity of the present stock, I believe to have varied with the different populations with which the Germanic invaders came in contact. Although both the Lapp and Kwain (i.e., the Laplander and the Finlander) are Ugrian, there is this important difference in respect to their relations to the Swedes and Norwegians. The Kwain and Scandinavian intermarry; the Lapp and Scandinavian do not. Hence we infer that in proportion as the original Ugrians of the southern and central parts of Scandinavia approached the Lapp type, displacement and extermination was the rule, intermixture the exception; whereas, on the other hand, the natives of the Kwain type may have amalgamated with their invaders. If so, the present Scandinavian stock is pure or mixed in proportion as the area it occupied was Lapp or Kwain. The details of this question are difficult. As a rough rule, however, we may say that the basis becomes less and less Ugrian as we proceed northwards; inasmuch as the type became more and more Lapponic, and the Germanic intermixture less and less.

The Gothlanders from the first were, probably, half-bloods, i.e., Ugrian on the mother’s side, as the invasion was maritime. The extent to which they are, at present, Germanic in blood as well as language, is uncertain.

The Goths from Prussia effected settlements in Sweden, why not also the Kwains of Finland? I think I find traces of their having done so in the name Anger-man-land, or Angria, which can scarcely be supposed to resemble the name of the Inger-man-land or Ingria, on the Gulf of Finland, by accident. But what if the name were not native, as I think it was not? In that case it is Goths who give it—both to the Ingrians and the Angrians. If so, Gothland must, at one time, politically, at least, have reached as far as 64° north latitude, the parallel of Angermania.

But the name may have been a common rather than a proper one, and have meant simply the March. If so, a Kwain settlement is unnecessary, and Anger-manna-land=the Land of the men of the frontier, that frontier being Lapp. If so, Lapp-mark is its Swedish equivalent.

THE European population of the Ottoman Empire, laying aside Jews, Armenians, and other similarly non-indigenous populations, is fivefold—Turk, Greek, Slavonic, Rumanyo, and Albanian. The Albanian, however, it was necessary to consider in the first chapter.

Rumelia, the province which first comes into notice is, the true and proper area of the Turks, Ottomans, or Osmanlis; a family which, considered in respect to European ethnology, is as unimportant from its numerical magnitude, as it is recent in respect to its introduction. Yet this is a fact which we are slow to perceive at first; since the Turkish empire is so great, that, unless we separate its ethnological from its political elements, we fail to realize the extent to which the Osmanlis are not only intrusive, but inconsiderable. It is only in one of its provinces that the number of the Osmanli conquerors so nearly approaches that of the original Europeans, to give them the appearance of the natural occupants of the country; this being the province in question, coinciding, as nearly as possible, with the Valley of the ancient Hebrus, or the modern Maritza. It is a wide and fruitful plain, that Nature, perhaps, meant for tillage, but which the pastoral habits of its possessors have kept a grazing country. It is a plain, with the exception of the small mountain ridges on each side—the Despoto-Dagh and the Stanches-Dagh—a point worth remembering, because its physical conditions determine the probable permanence of its earlier populations—populations which, in all impracticable countries, are likely to have held their own in the mountains, and to have retreated before an invader in the plains.

As A.D. 1458 is the date of the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II. it may also pass for the date of the commencement of the Osmanli sway in Europe, and the Osmanli preponderance in the particular occupation of the province of Rumelia; for the time, in short, when ancient Thrace became Turkish. But the preliminaries had been going on for some time before, and it was as early as A.D. 1360 that the Hellespont was crossed by Amurath I. Till then, the Osmanli belonged to Asia Minor, Anatolia, or Roum, as it was called from the declining power of the degenerate Romans of Constantinople. But they were not indigenous even there; since Roum or Anatolia was a conquered country, even as Rumelia was—conquered, too, from the same degenerate and fictitious Romans. Hence the stream of Ottoman blood that passed from Asia to Europe was by no means pure. The occupancy of Asia Minor was not the work of a day; on the contrary, the process of appropriation was upwards of four centuries in duration; since the conquest of the race of Seljuk began in A.D. 1074. And this again was an extension of frontier from Persia; and Persia was never truly Turk. The stream that spread and wasted itself in Europe is not discovered at its fountain-head until we have traced it from Rumelia to Anatolia, from Anatolia to Persia, and from Persia to either Turkistan or further. Then, indeed, we find amongst the most southern members of the great Turk stock, amongst those whose blood has been most mixed, and amongst those who are farthest from the country of the Mongols of Mongolia, the great great ancestors of the family and followers of Othman.

It must be remembered that all the recorded movements that thus brought a conquering population from the Oxus to the Hebrus were military—marches of armies consisting of hosts of warriors. That anything approaching a national migration wherein the females bore a reasonable proportion to the males ever took place in Turkish ethnology has not been shown; so that, on the mother’s side, the Osmanli must, in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred, be other than Turk—sometimes Persian, sometimes Armenian, sometimes Georgian or Circassian, sometimes Anatolian (for some such adjective is required to denote the population of Asia Minor), sometimes European—and when European, Greek, Wallachian, Albanian, or Slavonic.

I have enlarged upon this because the majority of the travellers who, in Independent Tartary, Siberia, Turcomania, or Bokhara, meet with the other members of the Turk stock, in their original homes, are struck by the extent to which they differ in physiognomy from the Osmanli or Ottoman of Europe. They are often smooth-skinned and beardless, glabrous and glaucous, with high-cheek bones and oblique eyes, and other similar characteristics of the Mongol. The inference from this has, too often, been the wrong way; and an infusion of Mongolian blood been presumed. The truth is, that it is the Turks of Europe that have been modified; at any rate, it is only with the European that an intermixture of blood at all proportionate to the differences of physical conformation can be shown as an historical fact.

As a general rule the Osmanli prefers pastoral to agricultural employment, and dominant idleness to either. There is a reason for his preference to flocks and herds rather than to corn and tillage. His own proper and original area, the parts to the east and north of the Caspian, is a steppe, fitted for the nomad, but unfitted for the husbandman. Here, and here only, he has not been an intruder and a conqueror. Here, and here only, has he been without a subject population to work for him. This he has in Europe, this he has in Bokhara, this he has in Egypt; so that his love for looking-on and enjoying the labour of others is what he shares with the rest of the world, whereas his preference of a shepherd’s life to a cultivator’s is a habit rather than instinct. In the few parts of the original Turk area, where the conditions of soil and climate are favourable to agriculture, and where he is no dominant lord, but only an ordinary occupant, the Turk is as good a farmer as the generality. If he be not so in Asia Minor it is due to the insecurity of the fruits of his industry. On the other hand, in the valley of the Gurgan (falling into the Caspian from the east) the pre-eminently Turk branch of the Goklan Turcomans is mainly employed upon agriculture—growing grain and rearing silkworms. This, it may be said, is a singular instance. It is so; but where, besides, does any member of the great Turk stock come under the conditions necessary for agricultural industry—a fit soil and climate, combined with security of possession, and the absence of a subject and inferior class? Like any other fact, however isolated, it sets aside the current notion of the unfitness of the Turk for regular and industrial labour; a habitude, which, like so many other points of ethnology, is connected with external circumstances far more than blood, pedigree, or race.

The intellectual development of the Turk stock in general has been that of the majority of the families of mankind—moderate, or less than moderate; for invention and originality are the exceptions rather than the rule. And here they are in the same predicament as they were in respect to their industry. In their original country they are far removed from the contact of any literature or science better than their own; for what are the models for the Turk of Independent Tartary? In the country of their conquests they have clever Greeks and Arabs to do their head-work for them. And we may add to these drawbacks, the unfavourable effects of their creed. The language that gave them the Koran can give them nothing useful for the Europe of the nineteenth century; whilst the Europe of the nineteenth century is, in their eyes, a Europe of infidels.

However much we may lament the bigotry, ignorance, and sensuality of the Osmanli, he is only what his creed, conquests, and other unfortunate conditions make him. Of the hardy and simple families of the world, as opposed to the effeminate and subtle, he belongs to the most typical. This is shown in his history. Of the material conquerors of the world, of the disturbers of things physical by physical force, the Turks are the greatest: since what they have won has been by hardihood of will and strength of arm far less than by diplomacy or the more indirect effects of their arts and literature—of which, indeed, they have had none. But because they have been thus material, they have not been permanent. Had they conquered, like the ancient Romans, Egypt and Barbary and Servia and Persia and Hindustan would be Turk, giving an area greater than that of the Anglo-Saxons or the Slavonians. Still, they are the great material conquerors of history.

Yet this is but a result of certain physical and geographical conditions:—no proof of any specific hardihood of nature. It is no fanciful imagination to say, that the areas of the great conquering nations of the world, are as definitely bounded by certain lines of latitude as are those of climate; and that such areas give us zones of conquest and subjugation as truly as the Temperate or the Frigid give us zones of climate. There are a priori reasons for this; and there are proofs of it in every page of history. The effects of a northern latitude are to stunt the population, after the fashion of the Laplander; those of the tropics to enervate. Between these extremes the peoples that are at once hardy and well-grown strike, as with a two-edged sword, both upwards and downwards, north and south. The Germans, Slavonians, Turks, and Algonkins verify this. Sometimes a superior civilization, sometimes undeveloped energies, referable to some new influences, counteract this natural disposition (one of the nearest approaches to a law in ethnology) but the general rule is, as has been stated,—apparent exceptions, as are the Romans and Arabians.

The Turks pressed forward in the direction of Europe, even as the Sarmatians did towards India, earlier than they have the credit of doing. The Skoloti have been already considered. But what do we find in the early history of Asia Minor? A mountain throughout the Turk area is Tagh or Dagh. The mountain from which the 10,000 Greeks saw the sea was Thekh-es. This, perhaps, is accidental. But who dwelt around it? The Skythini, the Anatolian equivalents to the Russian Skythæ. But this proves too much, since Skythæ was no native name, but one of Sarmatian origin, and, as such, indicative of Sarmatians in the parts about. Otherwise, how could it be used? These Sarmatians cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless, the name in the Anabasis of the king of the Paphlagonian neighbours of the Scythini, near the mountain Thekhes, is Korylas, and Kral is the Lithuanic for king. But king is a common, not a proper name. So is Zupan (=chief, lord, or superior) in the present Slavonic. Yet Gibbon speaks of Zupanus, as a king so-called, by certain Slavonians of the Middle Danube. All this may be accidental. Such accidents, however, are stranger than the facts which explain them away.

Ottomans, Greeks, Romans, Goths, and Slavonians have all modified the original blood of Thrace; yet the present blood of Ottoman Rumelia is, probably, more Thracian than aught else, Thracian on the mothers’ side.

The old Thracian affinities are difficult; but not beyond investigation. A series of statements on the part of good classical authors tell us, that the Daci were what the Getæ were, and the Thracians what the Getæ; also, that the Phrygians spoke the same language as the Thracians, and the Armenians as the Phrygians. If so, either the ancient language of Hungary must have been spoken as far as the Caspian, or the ancient Armenian as far as the Theiss. Many facts are against this: indeed the evidence must be dealt with by attributing two languages to Phrygia, one approaching the nearest tongue on the East, which would be the Armenian, and another standing in the same relation to the Thracian, on the west. This distinction being drawn, the rest is probable.

The evidence as to there having been members of the Thracian stock on both sides the Hellespont, is not limited to the Phrygians of Mysia. The Bithyni and others are in the same category. Which way was the migration? It is generally believed to have been from Asia to Europe; but the deduction of the Greeks from Italy, and that of the Sanskrit language from Europe, modifies this view. In truth, the present writer reads the whole history of Thrace backwards; seeing in the majority of the populations akin to the Thracians on the eastern side of the Hellespont signs of European intrusion. Signs, too, of European intrusion he sees in the world-wide tale of Troy; the historical basis of the great Homeric poems being not the struggle between the Greek and the Asiatic, but that between the Greek and Thracian, each fighting for a footing in Asia Minor. Perhaps the beginning of the Greek colonization was the end of the Sarmatian; for the ancient Thracians I believe to have belonged to this stock. Like the Lithuanians of the Cimmerian Bosphorus, they have effected their share of achievements in India; their conquests having been Bacchic, Thracian, and Slavonic, just as the Cimmerian inroads were Lithuanic. So that there was a double origin to the so-called Indo-Europeans of Hindostan and Persia; a trace of which may possibly,—I do not say probably—exists at the present moment in the name Jat.[23]

Between the original Thracian basis and the present dominant population of Osmanlis, there have been the following elements of intermixture: Pelasgic (whatever that was), Semitic, Hellenic, Roman, Gothic, Slavonic, and Bulgarian.

So far as the Macedonians were other than Hellenic, they were either Skipetar or Slavonian, i.e., in the category of the ancient Albanians, or in the category of the ancient Thracians; or they may have been mixed in some unascertained manner. Even if we suppose them to have pressed southwards and eastwards from the head-waters of the Axius, and from the southern boundary of Servia, a place for them in the same great class with the Thracians is admissible; and, in all probability, southern Servia was their original locality. That they, too, pressed forwards in Asia is likely. That words so radically alike as Mygdon-es and Macedon-es, are wholly unconnected, and that they resemble each other by accident, is what I am slow to believe; but that the line of demarcation between the Thracians and Macedonians is broad and trenchant for members of the same stock, is likely, since each was an encroaching population, and, as such, a population which obliterated transitional and intermediate varieties.

It is well known that of the three localities of the Pelasgian stock, known under that name within the period of authentic history, two are in Macedonia: one of these we get from Herodotus, the other from Thucydides.

1. Herodotus mentions the Pelasgi of Khreston—above the Tyrsênians.

2. Thucydides, those of Cleonæ, Dium, and Olophyxus on the peninsula of Mount Athos.

The Pelasgi of the third locality, the Asiatic Pelasgi, or the Herodotean Pelasgi of the parts about Plakia and Skylake, near Cyzicus, may reasonably be considered as settlers of comparatively recent origin, both from the general phenomena of ethnological distribution, and the most scientific interpretation of the few data we possess for the ancient ethnology of Asia Minor.

But the Pelasgi of Chreston and Mount Athos, are in localities wherein they may as easily be aboriginal as intrusive. Which were they? I cannot make up my mind; I can only exhaust the two alternatives. If aboriginal, they were one of three things, Skipetar, Slavonic, or members of an extinct stock; if intrusive, members of some extinct stock, Asiatic or Italian. How they may have been, this is easily understood.

1. An eastern extension of the oldest Skipetar area would carry a population akin to the ancestors of the present Albanians as far as the Ægean.

2. A southern extension of the Thracian area would carry the ancient Thracian stock as far as Thessaly.

3. Semitic, or other Asiatic colonies, would give us a series of maritime settlements.

4. So would a series of very early Italian colonizations. These we may deduce from some part of Italy, different from the mother-country of the true Hellenic Greeks; and we may, also, assume a difference in the date of the movement. In such a case the Pelasgi may have been Hellenic, as the Anglo-Saxons were Scandinavian; in other words, out of two Italian colonizations one (the Pelasgic) may have been the analogue to the Angle, the other (the Hellenic) to the Danish invasion of Britain.

Of these alternatives I prefer the second and fourth to the first and third.

The name itself seems to have been applied to one stock only, not to several—though the evidence of this is by no means conclusive.

It seems not to have been native. Native names are, usually, more specific and less general. It was a name which A gave to B, not one which B gave itself.

It seems to have been originally other than Greek.

With a strong inclination to see in the Œnotrian conquest of Greece a third rather a second stream of population, and with the belief that the earliest displacement of the original Skipetar population was effected by movements from Thrace and Macedon (by members of the great Slavonic stock), the Greek occupancy being later than this; favouring, too, the idea that the Pelasgi of Macedon were, at one and the same time, indigenous to the soil, and members of the same stock as the Thracians (the stock being the Slavonic); I am opposed to the broad line of demarcation which so many recent authors have drawn between the Hellenic civilization and the Thracian, a line of demarcation which has led them, in many cases, to explain away rather than admit the evidence of several good writers of antiquity, as to the influence of the Thracian music and the Thracian poetry on early Greece.

To claim for the Homeric poems the same amount of Thracian elements that the Welshman claims for those of the cycle of King Arthur, would be to illustrate the obscurum per obscurius, inasmuch as the Welshman’s claim is of a somewhat impalpable nature. It cannot attach to the poems themselves, in any known form. They are all in Norman-French, or German, or English, or Italian—none in Welsh. Neither are they translations of a Welsh original now lost. Neither is their subject-matter Welsh to the amount of one-third. Yet, the germ of the fiction is, in some way or other, Welsh, and the claim of the Welshman is, up to a certain point, valid.

Mutatis mutandis, let us ask whether the Trojan cycle may not, in the same sense, be Slavonic—assuming the Thracians to have belonged to that stock?

I. a. When we find the name of a non-historical person coincide with that of an historical people or an historical locality, it is a fair inference, all the world over, to consider that form as an epônymus.

b. It is also fair to connect such legends as attach to the name with the people or the locality.

c. Now several names in the early Greek epic cycles are thus eponymic—thus localized in Thracian and other similar localities—Teucer, Æneas, Dardanus, &c.

II. Again—the national poetry of the existing Slavonic nations, more nearly approaches—longo intervallo, I admit—that of the Homeric Greeks than does that of any other families of mankind.

III. The metres do the same.

IV. The Sanskrit metres are in the same category with the Slavonic; so that—the European origin of the Sanskrit being admitted—the similarity must be of great antiquity.

These points cannot be enlarged on. They form, however, the basis of some claim for the existence of Slavonic elements in the old heroic poetry of Greece; which—it must be remembered—originated on the Helleno-Slavonic debatable land of Æolic Asia.

The propounder of an hypothesis has no right to lay down, peremptorily, the laws by which his doctrine is to be tested. At the same time, he may fairly claim that the objections to it should rest on the same broad grounds on which it is based. The Homeric poems are Greek; and the Orlando Furioso is Italian. Yet there are Welsh and other non-Italian elements in the latter, and, it is submitted, that there are Slavonic and non-Hellenic elements in the former. Their amount I do not profess to measure.

Bosnia, Herzegovna, Turkish Croatia,—Slavonic in speech, and Slavonic in blood, the Bosnians and Herzegovnians differ from the Servians only in a few details—the chief being their Mahometan creed. Equally slight is the difference between the Turkish and Austrian Croatians.

Bulgaria is Slavonic and Rumanyo in speech, Mœsian, Gothic, Turk, and Slavonic in blood.

Bukhovinia.—Bukhovinia was part of the ancient Dacia, and the bulk of the population is, consequently, Rumanyo.

A smaller portion is common to Bukhovinia and Gallicia, and this is chiefly Russniak, but partly Pole.

Gallicia and Lodomiria.—At present these are Russniak areas encroached upon by Poles and Germans: indeed, it was from Gallicia, Lodomiria, and Bukhovinia, that the Malorussians seem to have originated, and Russia to have been conquered.

Gallicia, however, at one time seems to have been occupied, more or less partially, by the most south-western members of the Lithuanic family—the Gothini of Tacitus, whose language is stated to have been Gallic. I have suggested, elsewhere, the likehood of this meaning Gallician—there being no reason to look upon that name as one of recent origin. More than this, without denying the existence of true Gauls on those several portions of the water-system of the middle Danube where they are placed by ancient writers under the name of Galatæ, I am inclined to believe that they were rather Gallician and Gallic.

For Gallicia to have been Lithuanic, Volhynia must have been Lithuanic[24] also, unless we suppose the Gothini to have been an isolated settlement; which, perhaps, they were.

Bohemia.—Whatever may be the inferences from the fact of Bohemia having been politically connected with the empire of the Germanic Marcomanni, whatever may be those from the element Boio-, as connecting its population with the Boii of Gaul and Bavaria (Baiovarii), the doctrine that the present Slavonic population of that kingdom—Tshekhs as they call themselves—is either recent in origin or secondary to any German or Keltic aborigines, is wholly unsupported by history. In other words, at the beginning of the historical period Bohemia was as Slavonic as it is now.

From A.D. 526 to A.D. 550, Bohemia belonged to the great Thuringian empire. The notion that it was then Germanic (except in its political relations) is gratuitous. Nevertheless, Schaffarik’s account is, that the ancestors of the present Tshekhs came, probably, from White Croatia: which was either north of the Carpathians, or on each side of them. According to other writers, however, the parts above the river Kulpa in Croatia sent them forth. In Bohemian the verb ceti=to begin, from which Dobrowsky derives the name Czekh=the beginners, the foremost, i.e. the first Slavonians who passed westwards. The powerful Samo, the just Krok, and his daughter, the wise Libussa, the founder of Prague, begin the uncertain list of Bohemian kings, A.D. 624-700. About A.D. 722, a number of petty chiefs become united under P’remysl, the husband of Libussa. Under his son Nezamysl, occurs the first Constitutional Assembly at Wysegrad; and in A.D. 845, Christianity was introduced. But it took no sure footing till about A.D. 966. Till A.D. 1471, the names of the Bohemian kings and heroes are Tshekh—Wenceslaus, Ottokar, Ziska, Podiebrad. In A.D. 1564, the Austrian connexion and the process of Germanizing began.

Now, in considering the heroic age of Tshekh literature, Schaffarik himself, though firmly holding the doctrine of a previous Germanic population, remarks, that “there is no trace of any remnant of the German spirit having survived in Bohemia. The remains of such Germanic population as there were, must have been a weak remnant, and soon have become lost in the Slavonic nationality. Even the stronger most probably withdrew to the lonely hills.”

Moravia.—The history and ethnology of Moravia is nearly that of Bohemia, except that the Marcomannic Germans, the Turks, Huns, Avars, and other less important populations may have effected a greater amount of intermixture. Both populations are Tshekh, speaking the Tshekh language—the language, probably, of the ancient Quadi.

Austrian Silesia.—The basis of the population is Sorabian, i.e. akin to the Srbie, and Serskie of Lusatia. Like Gallicia, however, it has become Polish in language wherever it is not German.

Dalmatia.—The bulk of the present population is Slavonic, closely allied to the Servians, Bosnians, Herzegovnians, and Montenegriners. The foreign elements, however, are considerable.

First came the Roman conquest; then the Avar; then Germanic, then Arab, and then Venetian influences. Besides this there were Mongol inroads, and an absolute conquest of the neighbouring countries of Bosnia and Herzegovna by the Turks.

In Dalmatia we have a Slavonic population addicted to maritime habits. The Liburnians of old, the Narentines, the Uskoks, the Almissans during the contests between Venice and the Turks are prominent in the history of piracy. On the other hand the history of more than one Republic—Ragusa, Poglizza—shows that the Dalmatian temper has not been dead to the spirit of political liberty.

Croatia is Slavonic nearly as Servia and Bosnia are Slavonic. The Croatian dialect, without the two being mutually unintelligible, differs from the so-called Illyrian of the Vinds, Slovenians, or Slovenzi of—

Istria, Carniola, Carinthia, and Styria, all truly Slavonic districts, though, of course, partially occupied by an encroaching population of Germans on the northern, and of Italians on the southern frontier.

Salzburg, the northern half of the Tyrol, and the Vorarlberg I believe to have been originally as Slavonic as Carinthia, and also that they are at the present moment Slavonic in blood, though German in language.

Upper and Lower Austria I believe to have been in the same predicament.

The southern half of the Tyrol had its affinities with the south rather than the north, and was originally, in part at least, Etruscan. It must be remembered that it by no means follows that because it was Etruscan it was necessarily other than Slavonic.

Hungary.—The complex ethnology of Hungary now remains for consideration.

The Banat is a mixture of recently introduced populations in the way of colonization.

Transylvania is German, Rumanyo and Sekler, a term which will be noticed hereafter.

The central parts only are Majiar—Majiar meaning the population which speaks the Majiar language, which originated in Asia, and which in the tenth century effected intrusions and conquests in Hungary, just as the Osmanlis did in Rumelia. The details of the Majiar movements from the Ural Mountains to the Danube are obscure. They are said, however, to have been driven from their own locality by the Petschenagi. They are also mentioned as having taken that part of Russia which is called Susdal, in their way.

Seven was the number of the names of their patriarchs, who where Almus, the father of Arpad, Eleud of Zobolsu, Cundu of Curzan, Ound of Ete,[25] Tosu of Lelu, Huba of Zemera, Tahut of Horca; but the tribes, clans, or generations were far more numerous. In one of the traditions they amount to one hundred and eight. In the genealogies themselves we can trace more than one family to a single patriarch, since the tribes of Calan and Consoy are derived from Ete, the son of Ound. In these divisions and subdivisions we see a far greater resemblance to an Asiatic than to a European state of society; indeed, we may easily imagine that it is Turks or Mongols that we are reading of.

I cannot find that they came to Europe accompanied by their wives and daughters. Their march was rapid, since it was game and fish that they subsisted on rather than on the produce of agriculture. “Every day they hunted, so that the Hungarians are skilful above other nations in the chase. By hunting and fishing they got their daily food.”

They are described as a people of excessive rudeness and cruelty. “The nation of the Hungarians, fiercer then any brute beast, killed but few with the sword, though many thousands with their arrows. These they shot from bows of horn with such skill that their blows could not be guarded against it. This mode of fighting was dangerous in proportion as it was novel. It was like that of the Britons, except that where the one used darts the other used arrows.”

The Majiars were darker-skinned than the Turks; such, at least, is the plain interpretation of the epithet black, which is applied to them by Nestor; who calls them the black Ugri (Ugri czerni) in contradistinction to the white Ugri (Ugri bjeli), by which he is supposed to mean the Khazars.

From about A.D. 889 to A.D. 955, the Majiars were the scourge of the countries along the Danube; and in Bavaria, Saxony, Thuringia, Franconia, Hesse, Alsatia, and even France, they fought battles with various success—at first as conquerors. Afterwards, however, the tide of success turned against them, and a signal victory near Merseburg, in A.D. 934, first broke their power, which was afterwards limited to their present area by a more decisive victory on the Lech in A.D. 955.

I have remarked upon the extent to which the division of the Majiars into tribes, families, clans, or generations, has a Turk or Mongol look; and I now add that it is possible that it may actually be so. There are numerous proofs of the presence of Turk tribes in Hungary—the three most, important of which are—1. The Avars; 2. The Petschenagi; and 3. The Kumanians.

This is no more than we expect: since there were not only the descendants of the Huns of Attila settled in the country, but several separate subsequent invasions from the east had occurred in the interval.

1. The Avars, for more than three centuries after the death of Attila, continued to be the chief population of Pannonia; a population engaged in perpetual wars with their neighbours in Croatia, Moravia, and Transylvania, and, frequently, extending their invasions to Bohemia, Germany, and even France. Whether they were the absolute descendants of the Huns of Attila, under a new name, or not, is unimportant; since, if they were not Huns in the strict sense of the term, they were a very closely allied population. I think they formed the bulk of the Pannonians during the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. But, as the strength of the Slavonians of Moravia, Upper Hungary, Croatia and Servia increased, the power of the Avars waned, and, weakened as they were at the time of the Majiar invasion, they lost their language and nationality and name soon after that event. Till then, however, they had a separate existence, though reduced in importance. In the time of Nestor the extinction of the Avars, whom the Russians call Obri, was indicated by the following bye-word,—“they are gone even as the Obri; neither kith nor kin remains.” Whether they were most amalgamated with the Slavonians or the Majiars is doubtful. Such Hun blood as runs in the veins of the present Hungarians is referable to the Avars; at least it is certain that unless we supposed the Huns of Attila to have remained in Hungary (Pannonia) under the name of Avar, we cannot well trace their continued existence in that country; besides which the words Hun and Avar, are frequently used as synonymous—“Huni qui et Avares dicuntur.”

2. The Petschenagi, a branch of the great Turk family, were, even in Asia, the nearest neighbours of the ancestors of the Majiars; their locality being the parts between the Jaik and the Uralian Mountains. Their invasion of Russia is placed by Nestor in A.D. 915; their settlements being the parts between the Lower Dnieper and the mouths of the Danube. We find them in Hungary under the name of Bisseni.

3. The Kumanians appear in Europe rather later than the Petschenagi and Majiars, i.e., in the latter half of the eleventh century. Volhynia is the country where they more especially settled. Like the Petschenagi they were Turk, but not Mahometan. On the contrary, they are described as unclean Pagans, who ate all sorts of meat, and some of it raw.

4. The fourth section of the Turk stock which made settlements in Hungary were the Khazars. I should not, however, like to assert positively that they were not Avars under another name, or, at any rate, a closely allied population.

5. The fifth were the Bulgarians. Without fixing the date of their advent, we may safely assume that it was subsequent to the conversion of some portion of the nation to Mahometanism, although previous to their adoption of the Slavonic language.

But the remarkable fact is the name of one of their leaders Heten,[26] a name which we see in the list of the proper Majiar patriarchs. This confirms the notion that the division into tribes and sub-tribes may have been less Majiar and more Turk than it seems to be.

The Bashkirs of Hungary are a difficult population. In the thirteenth century, the Arabian writer Jakut, writes that he found in the city of Aleppo some florid-faced Mahometans, who were called Bashkirs, and came from Hungary.

Now, the present Bashkirs are the occupants of those parts beyond the Uralian Mountains from which the Majiars came: their language being Turk. But, as there is satisfactory evidence that this is an adopted tongue, and that their original speech was Ugrian, they are reasonably supposed to represent in the thirteenth century, not the Majiars of Hungary, but the Majiars of the mother-country from which the invaders of Europe proceeded. If so, how came they to be Mahometans? Were they not rather the Bulgarians last mentioned? Their florid complexion is the chief fact against it. On the other hand, it must be remarked that though Jakut says that they were called Bashkirs (“audiebant Baschgardi”) he does not say that they called themselves so. Again, the number of their chiefs is seven—the number of the so-called Majiar patriarchs; amongst whom it must remembered we find the Bulgarian Heten.

Hence, of a Bashkir intermixture, separate from the Bulgarians on one side, and the Majiars on the other, there is no satisfactory evidence.

The analysis as far as it has proceeded has given us—

The Majiar conquest converted a Turk into a Ugrian area: its date being the tenth century.

The Hun conquest converted a semi-romanized into a Turk area; its date being the fifth century. A.D. 444 is a convenient epoch for this event. It was the year of the murder of Attila’s brother, and the sole supremacy of Attila himself.

We will first ask how Attila left Hungary: next how he found it.

I am not at all satisfied with the reasons generally given for believing that, as his power fell to pieces at his death, so did the Hun blood in Hungary become extinct. Still less am I satisfied with the reasons which give any particular nation the credit of having destroyed it. The recovery of the province of Pannonia never took place. I cannot find that either the Goths of the Lower, or the Germans of the Upper, Danube made any permanent conquest. That the Slavonic tribes of the surrounding frontier pressed towards the interior is certain; but it is not certain that they ever made the country their own.

That the political power of the descendants of Attila was broken is certain; and for that very reason, I believe that the ethnological influence of the Huns remained. The son of Attila was not the king of the Huns, because Hun seems to have been a collective name, and, perhaps, was not a native one. But he was king of several of the populations in detail, of which, along with others, the Hun power was made. The tribes most ready to avail themselves of the death of Attila were the Goths of the Lower Danube—Bulgaria, and (perhaps) Servia. Now these first attacked the Setagæ of Lower Pannonia; and when Dinzic, the son of Attila knew of it he opposed them with the few tribes that still acknowledged his dominion, the Ultzinzures, the Angesuri the Bitugures, and the Bardones. All these were particular Hun populations, who, as long as the Hun power was at work on a large scale were merged in one general name, but who afterwards step forth as separate substantive members of that great confederacy, or empire.

Still there was great encroachment; the invading populations of the Avars and the Bulgarians—so far as they were not Huns—being like the Ultzinzures, &c. of Turk blood.

Before the remains of the Huns of Attila were extinguished—probably before they were notably diminished—the closely allied Avars (Huns, perhaps, under another name) conquered Pannonia, and held it from the end of the sixth to that of the eighth century.

What with the remains of Attila’s army, and what with the Avars and the Bulgarians, I think that when the Majiars entered Hungary they found it, at least, as much Turk as aught else,—as much, but not more; for the history of Hungary between the Hun and the Majiar conquests seems to have been as follows:—

a. There was some reaction on the part of the Romans, assisted by—

b. The Goths, and perhaps by—

c. The remains of the native population of the frontiers.

The Gepidæ, too, were amongst the subjects of Attila. After his death they rebelled against his son. Between the Danube, the Theiss, and the Carpathian Mountains, their power grew steadily until the rise of the Avars and Lombards; the union of which two nations was too strong for them. By the beginning of the eighth century their national existence had ceased.

I cannot say to what stock the Gepidæ belonged. I think they were Slavonians.

Be this, however, as it may, their power seems to have been in the inverse ratio to that of the Avars, and they must be admitted as an element in the ethnology of Hungary, without being supposed to be a very important one.

We may well, then, say that no European population is more heterogeneous than that of Hungary.

a. In the countries of Saala and Eisenberg we have a simple extension of the Carinthians.

b. In Upper Hungary the Slovaks.

c. On the Croatian frontier, Croatians—to say nothing about the political union of the two kingdoms.

d. In Slavonia, Servians and Russians—a variety of the Servian section.

e. The Banat has already been noticed. So has—

f. Transylvania. The non-Majiar populations of all these districts are separated from the Majiars by the outward and visible signs of difference of language; and their ethnology is, consequently, widely different from that of the Jaszag and Kunszag. Of these, though the former is Slavonic and the latter Turk, in blood, each is Majiar in language.

Different, however, from all are the Seklers. Their peculiarity is, that they were Majiars before the great Majiar invasion of the tenth century; Ugrians, probably, in the army of Attila, as they easily might have been, and as their own belief makes them, whilst a passage in Alfred mentions the Syssele east of the land of the Vends. The word means settler in Majiar, and it is only by supposing an early Majiar invasion that its presence in the pages of Alfred can be explained.

It is in language that the Majiar is distinct from the rest of Europe. In blood there is but little difference. That a Majiar female ever made her way from the Ural Mountains to Hungary is more than I can find; the presumptions being against it. Hence, it is just possible that a whole-blooded Majiar was never born on the banks of the Danube. Whether the other elements are most Turk or most Slavonic is more than I venture to guess.

*      *      *      *

Why do I give a Sarmatian origin to the ancient populations of the Lower and Middle Danube? The details are too lengthy for exhibition; a sketch only can be given. Special testimony places the Thracians, the Getæ, the Daci, and the Triballi in the same class. The reasons in favour of the recent origin of the present Servians, Croatians, Carinthians, Slovaks, and Tshekhs, is inconclusive. The Jazyges of the Euxine were in the same category with the Jazyges of the Theiss, i.e. Slavonic. From these the intermediate populations cannot be separated.

But why carry the Slavonic area further west? In the Tyrol we have such geographical names as Scharn-itz, Gshnitz-thal, and Vintsh-gau; in the Vorarlberg, Ked-nitz and Windisch-matrei. Even where the names are less definitely Slavonic, the compound sibilant tsh, so predominant in Slavonic, so exceptional in German, is of frequent occurrence. This, perhaps, is little, yet is more than can be found in any country known to have been non-Slavonic. Besides which, there are no presumptions against the doctrine. Again—a Slavonic population in the Vorarlberg and Southern Bavaria best accounts for the name Vind-elicia.

*      *      *      *

Malta, Crete, and several of the Greek Islands, are European in respect to their politics only. Ethnologically, they are African and Asiatic. In Malta the language of the common people is Arabic, and the blood is probably Arabic also—the superadded elements being numerous.

The aboriginal population of Crete is problematical. If we admit the reasonable presumption that it was an extension of that of the Continent, Egypt and Phœnicia have each a claim; as has Greece. That Minos represents a different person—historical or mythological—from Menes is a current doctrine; but then the notion that any amount of similarity of name may occur within improbably narrow limits both of space and time is current also.

Hence, Egyptian, Phœnician, Anatolian, and perhaps other earlier elements are to be attributed to Crete anterior to the period of its Hellenization. Of the subsequent elements the Arabic is the most important. In each and all, too, of the other isles, the basis is non-Hellenic.

I have no opinion as to the original blood of Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic isles. The last are Spanish in speech, the other two Italian, Arabic elements having been superadded—those introduced by the Roman conquest, and by the Phœnician having preceded them.

*      *      *      *

If the ethnological analyses of the preceding pages be true, the extent to which the phenomena of what is called race are liable to over-valuation is considerable; so rare and exceptional is any approach to pure blood, and so little do pedigree and nationality coincide. The most powerful nations are the most heterogeneous. Yet the inference that mixture favours social development would be as unsafe as the exaggeration of the effects of purity. The conditions which are least favourable for a prominent place in the world’s history are the best for the preservation of old characters. The purest populations of Europe are the Basques, the Lapps, the Poles, and the Frisians; yet who can predicate any important character common to them all?

To attribute national aptitudes and inaptitudes or national predilections and antipathies to the unknown influences of blood, as long as the patent facts of history and external circumstances remain unexhausted, is to cut the Gordian Knot rather than to untie it. That there is something in pedigree is probable; but, in the mind of the analytical ethnologist, this something is much nearer to nothing than to everything.

THE END.

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The two last enumerated Works are in continuation of the series of “British Histories,” of which the Quadrupeds and Reptiles, by Professor Bell; the Birds and Fishes, by Mr. Yarrell; the Birds’ Eggs, by Mr. Hewitson; the Starfishes, by Professor Forbes; the Zoophytes, by Dr. Johnston; the Trees, by Mr. Selby; and the Fossil Mammals and Birds, by Professor Owen, are already published. Each Work is sold separately, and is perfectly distinct and complete in itself.

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Catalogue of Books

PUBLISHED BY MR. VAN VOORST.

INDEX.

Accentuated List, p. 7
Adams & Baikie’s Manual Nat. Hist., 12
Adams’s Genera of Mollusca, 5

Aikin’s Arts and Manufactures, 14
Anatomical Manipulation, 12
Ansted’s Ancient World, 9
—— Elementary Course of Geology, 9
—— Geologist’s Text-Book, 9
—— Gold-Seeker’s Manual, 9
—— Scenery, Science, and Art, 14
Babington’s Flora of Cambridgeshire, 7
—— Manual of British Botany, 7
Baptismal Fonts, 15
Bate and Westwood’s British Crustacea, 5
Beale on Sperm Whale, 3
Bell’s British Quadrupeds, 3
—— British Reptiles, 4
—— British Stalk-eyed Crustacea, 5
Bennett’s Naturalist in Australasia, 11
Bloomfield’s Farmer’s Boy, 16
Boccius on Production of Fish, 4
Bonaparte’s List of Birds, 3
Brightwell’s Life of Linnæus, 14
Burton’s Falconry on the Indus, 3
Church and Northcote’s Chem. Analysis, 9
Clark’s Testaceous Mollusca, 5
Cocks’s Sea-Weed Collector’s Guide, 8
Couch’s Illustrations of Instinct, 11
Cumming’s Isle of Man, 13
Currency, 16
Dallas’s Elements of Entomology, 5
Dalyell’s Powers of the Creator, 12
—— Rare Animals of Scotland, 12
Dawson’s Geodephaga Britannica, 7
Domestic Scenes in Greenland & Iceland, 14
Douglas’s World of Insects, 6
Dowden’s Walks after Wild Flowers, 8
Drew’s Practical Meteorology, 11
Drummond’s First Steps to Anatomy, 11
Economy of Human Life, 16
Elements of Practical Knowledge, 14
England before the Norman Conquest, 14
Entomologist’s Annual, 5
—— Companion, 6
Evening Thoughts, 14
Fly Fishing in Salt and Fresh Water, 4
Forbes’s British Star-fishes, 5
—— Malacologia Monensis, 5
—— and Hanley’s British Mollusca, 5
—— and Spratt’s Travels in Lycia, 13
Garner’s Nat. Hist. of Staffordshire, 13
—— Figures of Invertebrate Animals, 14
Gosse’s Aquarium, 13
—— Birds of Jamaica, 3
Gosse’s British Sea-Anemones, &c., 13
—— Canadian Naturalist, 13
—— Handbook to Marine Aquarium, 13
—— Manual of Marine Zoology, 13
—— Naturalist’s Rambles on Dev. Coast, 13
—— Omphalos, 10
—— Tenby, 13
Gray’s Bard and Elegy, 15
Greg and Lettsom’s British Mineralogy, 10
Griffith & Henfrey’s Micrographic Dict., 11
Harvey’s British Marine Algæ, 8
—— Thesaurus Capensis, 8
—— Flora Capensis, 8
—— Index Generum Algarum , 8
—— Nereis Boreali-Americana, 8
—— Sea-side Book, 13
Henfrey’s Botanical Diagrams, 7
—— Elementary Course of Botany, 7
—— Rudiments of Botany, 7
—— Translation of Mohl, 7
—— Vegetation of Europe, 7
—— & Griffith’s Micrographic Dict., 11
—— & Tulk’s Anatomical Manipulation, 12
Hewitson’s Birds’ Eggs, 3
—— Exotic Butterflies, 6
Instrumenta Ecclesiastica, 15
Jenyns’s Observations in Meteorology, 11
—— Observations in Natural History, 11
—— White’s Selborne, 13
Jesse’s Angler’s Rambles, 4
Johnston’s British Zoophytes, 6
—— Introduction to Conchology, 5
—— Terra Lindisfarnensis, 9
Jones’s Aquarian Naturalist, 11
—— Animal Kingdom, 11
—— Natural History of Animals, 11
Knox’s (A. E.) Rambles in Sussex, 3
Knox (Dr.), Great Artists & Great Anat., 11
Latham’s Descriptive Ethnology, 12
—— Ethnology of British Colonies, 12
—— Ethnology of British Islands, 12
—— Ethnology of Europe, 12
—— Man and his Migrations, 12
—— Varieties of Man, 12
Leach’s Synopsis of British Mollusca, 5
Letters of Rusticus, 12
Lettsom and Greg’s British Mineralogy, 10
Lowe’s Faunæ et Floræ Maderæ, 8
—— Manual Flora of Madeira, 8
Malan’s Catalogue of Eggs, 3
Martin’s Cat. of Privately Printed Books, 16
Melville and Strickland on the Dodo, 4
Micrographic Dictionary, 11
Mohl on the Vegetable Cell, 7
Moule’s Heraldry of Fish p. 4
Newman’s British Ferns 9
—— History of Insects 6
—— Letters of Rusticus 12
Northcote & Church’s Chem. Analysis 9
Owen’s British Fossil Mammals 10
—— on Skeleton of Extinct Sloth 10
Paley’s Gothic Moldings 16
—— Manual of Gothic Architecture 16
Poor Artist 14
Prescott on Tobacco 14
Prestwich’s Geological Inquiry 10
—— Ground beneath us 10
Samuelson’s Honey-Bee 10
—— Earthworm and Housefly 10
Sclater’s Tanagers 3
Seemann’s British Ferns at One View 7
Selby’s British Forest Trees 8
Shakspeare’s Seven Ages of Man 15
Sharpe’s Decorated Windows 15
Shield’s Hints on Moths and Butterflies 6
Siebold on True Parthenogenesis 6
Smith’s British Diatomaceæ 9
Spratt and Forbes’s Travels in Lycia 13
Stainton’s Butterflies and Moths 6
—— History of the Tineina 6
Strickland’s Ornithological Synonyms 4
—— Memoirs 10
—— and Melville on the Dodo 4
Sunday-Book for the Young 14
Tugwell’s Sea-Anemones 6
Tulk and Henfrey’s Anat. Manipulation 12
Vicar of Wakefield, Illustr. by Mulready 15
Watts’s Songs, Illustrated by Cope 16
Ward (Dr.) on Healthy Respiration 14
Ward (N. B.) on the Growth of Plants 8
Westwood and Bate’s British Crustacea 5
White’s Selborne 13
Wilkinson’s Weeds and Wild Flowers 7
Williams’s Chemical Manipulation 9
Wollaston’s Insecta Maderensia 7
—— on Variation of Species 12
Yarrell’s British Birds 3
—— British Fishes 4
—— on the Salmon 4