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I.

THERE are parts of the earth, uniform on the surface, but concealing a multitude of divers strata disposed at a small depth from the monotonous crust. Wherever the deeper layers are covered with alluvial and diluvial deposits, the surface is rendered homogeneous, while the subsoil retains all its original diversity. As in geology, so it is in ethnology. Not to speak of uncivilised or semicivilised races inhabiting remote quarters of the globe, nearly all European nations include a variety of heterogeneous elements with their former or actual differences hidden from view by fortuitous identity of language.

This remark applies equally to all the principal nationalities of the Continent. Everywhere foreign ingredients have been politically annexed, and linguistically embodied, by physical or intellectual force. Spain, chiefly Arabic in the south, Teuton in the centre, Celtic and Basque in north and east, is nevertheless outwardly Spanish everywhere. France, Roman in the south, Celtic in the centre and west, and Teutonic in considerable portions of the north and north-east, is yet very French

throughout. Germany, with a purely Teutonic north-west, combines a strong Celtic alloy in the musical and imaginative south, and a considerable Slavonic and Lithuanian admixture in the frigid and reasoning north-east. Yet the one speech of Fatherland is uniformly heard in all these various regions. Neither are the Slav nationalities less diversified. Of the southern Slavs, the Serbs and Croats are pre-eminently Slav; but the Bosnian is semi-Turk, the Montenegrin and Dalmatian is at least half Albanian, and the Bulgar is a FinnoTatar, and a comparatively recent immigrant from the Ural mountains. Despite their dissimilar origin, however, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Dalmatians and Montenegrins speak apparently the same tongue, and the Bulgarian sister dialect closely approximates the others of the same geographical group. Farther north the Bohemian Czech has swallowed up not a few Germans, tinging his speech with Teutonic idioms. The Pole, too, adds various foreign elements to his primary Slavonic stock. Danes, Germans, and Turk-Tatars are with tolerable distinctness traced as conquerors, who formed the Poles into the first commonwealth they ever possessed. In Russia the medley is quite as great. In that country the majority of the people are actually not of the descent popularly understood to be indicated by their name. Slavs and Slavdom being nowadays so much identified with the mighty

name of Rus, this part of our subject would seem to call for a few elucidatory remarks, even were it not intimately connected with the linguistic inquiry in hand.

When Rurik the Swede, towards the end of the ninth century, occupied North-Western Russia from the Baltic to Novgorod and Tver, the people he subjected to his rule were Slavs, seemingly without government, and easily reduced to obedience by the bold and imperious Northmen. Rurik's heir penetrated as far south as Kieff; while his later successors, in less than a century's time, annexed the farstretching eastern lands down to the river Oka and the ancient town of Susdal. The eastern lands thus added were entirely distinct from the western or Slavonic possessions of the Rurikian dynasty, being Finno-Tataric in point of race and speech;* but the diversity of the subject elements was hidden under the identity of the ruling nation. Swedes in those days calling themselves Rothrmen, i.e., Ruddermen, or sailors, the common appellation of Rothr,

* The term Finns is used throughout as a generic appellation of the most westernly branch of the great Finno-Tataric-Mongolian family of speech.

+ The inhabitants of the Oestergötland and Upland shores were formerly called Rods-karlar, 'rudder-men,' just as the Norwegian fishermen go to this day by the name of 'Rods-folk' or 'Ross-folk.' Hence 'Ruotsi,' the appellation given to the Swedes by their Finnish neighbours on the opposite shore, and 'Rus,' as pronounced by the Slavs. Cf. Rydquist, Svenska Sprakets Lagar;' Aasen, 'Norsk Ordbog;' Wiedemann, 'Estnisches Wörterbuch;' Thomsen, 'Relations between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia;' Ralston, 'Early Russian History.'

Ruothr, Roth, Ruth, was indiscriminately bestowed upon the entire extent of their dominion, no matter whether the inhabitants were Slavs or Finns. This is the origin of the promiscuous denomination of two distinct and, in historical times, altogether unrelated races by the name of a third, foreign to both. Still the foreign name did not attain equal prevalence in both sections of the Rurikian Empire. The Slavic portion of the Rurikian territory, indeed, was uniformly called Russ since the ninth century; but the Finnic division, which soon became politically separated from it, and probably never received more than a moiety of Swedish immigrants, for six centuries after the conquest went chiefly, and indeed almost exclusively, by the more ancient and indigenous names of Susdal and Muscovy. Not until 250 years ago, Muscovy, still more than half Finnic at that time, adopted the appellation of Rus for good. Having just then conquered from the Poles a portion of the Slavic country, to which the name more properly belonged, Muscovy thought it as well to announce her accession to the western community by dropping her Finnic designation, and taking that of the more European and more civilised race. Besides rendering her European, the style and title of Rus gave Muscovy an apparent right to fresh conquest in the same desirable quarter. With half the Ukraine taken from Poland and the title of a Russian

Grand Prince finally appropriated by the ruler of Muscovy, the wish to absorb the Southern Slav seemed to acquire the dignity of a legitimate dynastic claim. In this, it need hardly be said, Russia did neither more nor worse than every other power in those conquering days thought itself entitled to do.

The change of name was productive of characteristic consequences. Directly their Finnic and semi-Finnic neighbours began to don the name of Rus in preference to previous indigenous appellations, the Russians of Slavic descent, by whom the coveted epithet had been formerly all but monopolised, thought it necessary to mark their diversity from their new Finno-Tataric namesakes by pointedly calling themselves Slavic Russians. Up to that time they had, as a rule, contented themselves with the unqualified name of Russians. This reaction of the Muscovite change of name upon the designation of the Kieff Slavo-Russian people is curiously illustrated by the titles of the two oldest Slavo-Russian dictionaries extant. The first dictionary, by Lawrence Sisan, printed at Vilna in 1596, calls the language 'prosti Ruski dialect,' which means 'the Russian vernacular.' Thirty years later, upon a new dictionary being published at Kieff by Berinda, the author deemed it indispensable to describe his language on the title-page as Slaveno-Rosski, i.e., Slavo-Russic, in contradis

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