north-west of China, until the age of their celebrated leader, Tchinggis. This will appear from a survey of the Mongolian history in a following chapter.

The traits which Niebuhr considered as characteristic of the Mongolian nations are, however, equally displayed by the nomadic Turkish races, who had similar physical characters and similar habits, and a remarkable fondness for the milk of mares. But even the Turks were, in the age of the ancient Scythians, a people of the remote East: the great empire of the Hiong-nu was not yet divided. The Hunns, according to all the information that can be collected, were the earliest of the nations of Turan who approached the borders of Europe.

It is probable that all other nomades in Siberia or Great Tartary had nearly the same moral characteristics, as we have seen that the Cimmerians had before the arrival of the Scythians. Some races within the limits of Iran are nomadic, and the ancestry of the Slavonian people may have partaken of this character, with many Persian tribes who are akin to them. As for the difference in physical characters between the Slavonian race in present times and those recorded of the ancient Scythians, they are not greater, as we shall find, than the deviations which have occurred in the Turkish race itself.

We must here observe that Herodotus has himself described the physical characters of one tribe which belonged to the Scythian race. That the Budini, who lived to the north-west of the country of the Scoloti, were Scythians, we collect from the fact that they spoke the Scythian language, which appears clearly to result from two passages of the fourth book of Herodotus. The Budini are in all probability the Bodeni of Ptolemy, placed by that writer to the north-west of Scythia, and in the country afterwards that of the Sarmatic Alani, who were themselves of fair complexion. The Budini were remarkably distinguished by red hair and blue eyes, which were universal among them. They were a great and numerous people, and, though Scythians by language, were regarded as "autochthones" or indigenous inhabitants: they were phthirophagi and nomadic.

We thus find that although the ancient Scythians may have resembled the nations of Central Asia in their physical cha

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racters, some tribes of the race had the complexion, and probably also the form of the European nations, and of the modern Slovaks.

On the whole, it does not appear that any conclusive argument can be drawn from the physical and moral characters of the ancient Scythians, disproving the opinion that the Scoloti and the Sauromatæ were the ancestors of the Slavic race. And as for the difference of habits between a nomadic or equestrian people and solitary occupants of woods and marshes, such as the Slavi are described to have been, it is a change, as we have observed, that must needs have taken place when the Jazyges transferred their abode from the plains of the Tanais and the Borysthenes to the banks of the Tibiscus and the Hercynian forest.

It has been well observed, that the earliest names given by the ancients to the inhabitants of countries to the northward of the Euxine, the fabulous northern region of the Greeks, are descriptive of their physical characters or external aspect; and these names, though they belonged to races who have long since disappeared from the Pontic countries, yet indicate physical characters similar to those of the present inhabitants. In the Orphic verses and other relics of ancient mythical poetry, we hear of the Bathychaitones, or thickly-haired; the Sauromatæ, or lizard-eyed; Gymni, or naked; Kekryphoi, the concealed; Arnopes, sheep-faced, Arismaspi, or people said to be oneeyed. "Nature," says M. Kruse, " is always like herself, and produces similar offspring under similar external conditions. It would appear that certain climates are favourable to the developement of such physical characters, which take place wherever these are found,* and disappear in races which are removed from under their influence.

* Kruse über die Menschenstämme der Steppen, in Goebel's Reise in der Steppen des südlichen Russlands. (Th. ii. neunter Abschnitt.)

FRUSSIAN, LITHUANIAN, AND LETTISH RACE.

CHAPTER VIII.

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OF THE OLD PRUSSIAN, LITHUANIAN, AND LETTITH RACE.

SECTION I.-General Survey.

BEFORE the victories of the Teutonic knights had introduced the manners and the language of the Germans into the countries on the Lower Vistula, the inhabitants of East and West Prussia had a peculiar speech, as well as national superstitions, rites and ceremonies, and objects of religious worship, of their own. They formed a particular race of people, distinct from all their western and southern neighbours, and only allied to those of the north-east, who inhabited Lithuania and Lettland. Great efforts were made by warriors of the Teutonic order and their followers to efface all vestiges of the old Prussians as a separate people, and of their dialect as a distinct language; but this object had not been wholly accomplished at the era of the Reformation, and the Prussian dialect continued at that time to be spoken extensively in Sammland and Natangen, and in a part of the Prussian Oberland. Since that period it has given way very gradually to the German. In the time of Hartknoch, who wrote several learned works on the history, mythology, and language of the old Prussians, near the end of the seventeenth century, there were only a few aged persons who understood the ancient speech. It has now been long extinct as a language of conversation, but dialects known to be allied to it are spoken among the peasantry of Lithuania, Kurland, and Lettland, as far to the north

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ward as the river Memel. Of the Old Prussian itself considerable specimens have been preserved in the Lutheran catechism, published in 1545, and in some other religious books, which afford a sufficient groundwork for a comparison of this language with its kindred dialects.*

A difference of opinion has existed among writers on the history of the northern nations, whether the people who speak these dialects constitute a distinct branch in the stock of the Indo-European races, or sprang originally from a mixture of the Germans and Slavonians. The comparatively small extent of the country which they have occupied, and their local position between or adjoining to the countries inhabited of old by the two greater races above mentioned, have been thought to confirm the argument founded on the nature of their language in favour of this last conclusion. A large proportion of words belonging to the Lettish and Old Prussian dialects are, as it seems, common to them and the Slavonian language,+ and of the remainder a considerable number are found in the Gothic and other German dialects. Thunmann, a celebrated writer on the history of the eastern nations, discovered that the Lettish contains also many Finnish words, and he thence concluded that the Lettish race are a mixed people, descended from an assemblage of Finns, Germans, and Slavonians. It has been observed, however, by Adelung, that the Finnish words exist only in the Lettish, which is spoken by the people of this race who live near to the Finnish Liefi or Livonians, and that they are wanting in the Lithuanian and Old Prussian. Hence it has been inferred that the German and Slavi are the ancestral races of the great body of the people who for some centuries, at least, have inhabited the country between the Vistula and the Memel. This conclu

A Lettish dialect is spoken in parts of Livonia called Lettland: but the proper Livonian, or the native speech of the Lievi, is allied to the Esthonian, which is a Finnish language, though often by mistake supposed to be of the Lettish family. The Crivingo-Livonic in Pallas's Vocabularies, No. 44, is a specimen of a Lettish dialect, as Adelung has observed, spoken in the Kurische Nehrung. (Mithridates, Th. ii. p. 766.)

† Adelung estimates the roots of the Lettish which are common to the Slavonic as two-thirds of the whole number of roots belonging to the former language. See Mithridates, Th. ii. s. 697.

sion is doubtless the true one, unless it should appear, as many writers now maintain, that the Lithuanians and Old Prussians constitute a distinct branch of the Indo-European stock.

In favour of this last opinion is the fact, admitted by Schloezer and Dobrowsky, that the Lettish language has, besides what is common to it and the dialects of neighbouring nations, much that is peculiar to itself, and that this is the fundamental and original part.

It is evident that the solution of this problem turns chiefly upon philological considerations, but some historical details will assist in elucidating it.

SECTION II.-Of the Notices to be collected from early Writers concerning the History of the Old Prussian and Lettish Race, and of their Mythology.

The country between the Vistula and the Memel, especially the sea-coast, appears, as we have before observed, to have been inhabited from the earliest times by the Guttones or Gothones, and by a people who lived to the eastward of these, termed by Tacitus the Aestii. These, or other names nearly resembling them and differing but slightly in orthography, are traced on the coast of the Baltic from the time of Pytheas to that of Jornandes. The same tribes of people appear to have continued in possession of the Prussian coast from the third century B. C. to the era of the Gothic migration. Beyond these the old writers enable us to fix the position of another nation, termed Venedi, in the easternmost part of the Baltic. On the advance of the Gothic tribes towards the south, it is probable that the Venedi occupied the territory which they had abandoned: we know that there was a general movement of the north-eastern nations in the same direction. On this occasion Voigt and other writers on the history of Prussia suppose that the Goths and Wends became intermixed. Jornandes appears to afford some countenance to this conjecture. He says that the country near the estuary of the Vistula was inhabited by a people descended

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