plains into the barren and mountainous tracts bordering on the Carpathian chain, which their descendants still continue to inhabit. The Slovaks form altogether a considerable part of the population of Hungary. A recent English traveller has given us a very accurate account of the persons and habits of this race. He says, "The Slovaks in general are about the middle height, strongly formed, of a light complexion, with broad and coarse features half-shaded by their long, flaxen hair. In some particular districts there are found among them singularly fine and handsome men. The peasant women, when young, are sometimes pretty, but hard labour and exposure to the sun soon deprives them of all pretensions to comeliness." In their dispositions the Slovaks are described by the same writer as lazy and indolent, and they are said to be very inferior to the Magyars in energy and activity.

We have a brief account of the persons of the old Antes and Sclaveni from Procopius, which coincides remarkably with this description of the modern Slovaks.†

Speaking of the Antæ and Sclaveni he says,—“ ἔστι δὲ καὶ μία ἑκατέροις φωνὴ ἀτεχνῶς βάρβαρος· οὐ μὴν οὐδὲ τὸ εἶδος ἐς ἀλλήλους τι διαλλάσσουσιν· εὐμήκεις τε γὰρ καὶ ἄλκιμοι διαφερόντως εἰσὶν ἅπαντες· τὰ δὲ σώματα καὶ τὰς κόμας οὔτε λευκοὶ ἐσάγαν, ἤ ξανθοί εἰσιν, οὔτε πη ἐς τὸ μέλαν αὐτοῖς παντελῶς τέτραπται, ἀλλ ̓ ὑπέρυθροί εἰσιν ἅπαντες. † "One language belongs to both nations, which is very barbarous; nor do they differ at all in personal appearance, for they are all of good stature and remarkably robust: as to the complexion of their bodies and their hair, they have it neither very light nor flaxen, nor is it altogether inclined to black, but they are all somewhat red”—that is, red-haired.§ As we have observed that there are strong grounds for the

Hungary and Transylvania, by G. Paget, Esq. 8vo. vol. i. p. 87. † Procop. Cæsariens. Bell. Gotth. iii. p. 132.

The expression vπéρvěρoɩ might be supposed to refer to a ruddiness of complexion rather than the colour of the hair, but the words avoì and μéλav just preceding seem to limit the meaning and give it a reference solely to the hair. For the Sclavonians could not be termed either gav0oì or μéλavec except with reference to their hair.

§ The Slavi in the time of Procopius were inhabitants of the countries northward of the Danube, into which they had returned after this emigration of the Goths, from more northern tracts beyond the Krapak, near the sources of the Vistula.

conclusion, that the Slavic nations are descended from the ancient Sarmatæ, and that the Sarmata were a tribe of the Scythian race, since they not only had similar manners but spoke the language of the Scoloti with a merely dialectic variety, it becomes interesting on this occasion to advert to the physical characters of the Scythians.

Niebuhr has cited a passage from Hippocrates which he considered as proving that the ancient Scythians were a Mongolian race. He says, "That the Scythians were a Mongolian tribe, is placed beyond a doubt by the descriptions of the two great contemporaries. Hippocrates describes their gross and bloated bodies, their joints buried in fat, their swollen bellies, and their scanty growth of hair. I have already spoken of their universal resemblance in countenance and figure, which applies as little to the Tartars as to the Slavonians or Germans. This is a picture of the native tribes of Northern Asia, for whom there is no more generally suitable name than that of Mongols. The Chinese Mongolian remedy of burning, which the Scythians universally employed; the state of their bodies; as well as their mode of life and customs, all point to this race of mankind. The adoration of the god of war under the figure of a holy scimitar, which took place in the time of Attila, and again at the elevation of Genghis Khan, is a Mongolian custom: the milking of mares, the huts made of skins, the swinish filthiness, the paste with which the women plastered themselves, in order from time to time to remove the filth which closely adhered to their bodies, their sluggish listlessness, all these are Siberian features, and neither Slavonian nor Germanic. Again, intoxication from the vapour of hempseeds placed on red-hot stones and confined under close coverlets, is Siberian: only Herodotus confounds this with the vapour baths which the barbarians in those parts enjoyed, and perhaps carried to a luxurious excess."

It must be observed that the entire history of ancient nations in Asia contradicts the supposition that a Mongolian horde penetrated into Europe, or even to the western parts of Great Turkestan, at the early period here supposed. According to the united testimony of Tartar and Chinese historians, that race was confined to the mountains near the Onon, to the

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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PHYSICAL CHARACTERS OF THE SLAVONIANS.

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 Sauromata 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.

447

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