Part 13

In respect to the former, I think a case can be made out for continuing the _earliest_ occupancy of the populations represented by the Liefs of Courland, and the Rahwas of Estonia to the Oder at least; perhaps further. This means along the coast. Their extent inland is a more complex question. The so called Fin hypothesis in its full form is regarded, by the present writer, as untenable. But between this and a vast extension of the Fin area beyond its present bounds there is a great difference. It is one thing to connect the Basks of Spain with the Khonds of India; another to bring the Estonians as far west as the Oder, or even as the Elbe. It is one thing to make an allied population occupant of Sweden, Spain, and Ireland; another to refer the oldest population of western Russia to the stock to which the eastern undeniably belongs. This latter is a mere question of more or less. The other is a difference, not of kind, but of degree. With this distinction we may start from the most southern portion of the present Ugrian area; which is that of the Morduins in the Government of Penza. Or we may start from the most western which is that of the Liefs of Courland. What are the traces of Fin occupancy between these and the Vistula and Danube--the Vistula westward, the Danube on the South. How distinct are they? And of what kind? We cannot expect them to be either obvious or numerous. Say that they are the vestiges of a state of things that has passed away a thousand years, and we only come to the time of Nestor. Say that they are doubly so old, and we have only reached the days of Herodotus; in whose time there had been a sufficient amount of encroachment and displacement to fill the southern Governments of Russia with Scythians of Asiatic origin. The Britons were the occupants of Kent at the beginning of our æra. How faint are the traces of them. We must regulate, then, our expectations according to the conditions of the question. We must expect to find things just a little more Ugrian than aught else.

From that part of Russia which could, even a thousand years ago, exhibit an indigenous population we must subtract all those districts which were occupied by the Scythians. We do not know how much comes under this category. We only know that the Agathyrsi were in Hungary, and that they were, probably, intruders. We must substract the Governments of Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, and Taurida at the very least--much of each if not all. That this is not too much is evident from the expressed opinions of competent investigators. Francis Newman carries the Scythia of Herodotus as far as Volhynia, and, in Volhynia, there were Cumanian Turks as late as the 11th century. Say, however that the aborigines were not Fins. At any rate they were not the ancestors of the present Russians--and it is the original area of these that we are now considering. In the North there were Fins when Novorogod, and in the East Fins when Moscow, was founded. In Koursk, writes Haxthausen, there is a notable difference in the physiognomy of the inhabitants; the features being Fin rather than Slavonic.

I now notice the name of Roxolani. Prichard and, doubtless, others besides see in this a Fin gloss, the termination _-lani_ being the termination _-lainen_ in Suome_lainen_, Hame_lainen_ and several other Fin words, _i. e._ a gentile termination. It does not follow from this that the people themselves were Fins. It only follows that they were in a Fin neigbourhood. Some one who spoke a language in which the form in _-lain-_ was used to denote the name of a people was on their frontier, and this frontier must have been South of that of the Roxolani themselves--else how did it come to the ears of the Greeks and Romans? If this were not the case, then was the name native, and the Roxolani were Ugrian. In either case we have a Fin gloss, and a Fin locality suggested by it. Now the country of the Roxolani either reached, or approached, the Danube.

In the account of Herodotus a population named _Neuri_ occupied a marshy district at the back of the Scythian area; probably the marshes of Pinsk. This is, perhaps, a Fin gloss. The town of _Narym_ in the Ostiak country takes its name from the marshes round it.

The Lithuanian language avoids the letter _f._--using _p._ instead; sometimes _m._ The Greek φιλεω is _m_ylu in Lithuanic. The name, then, that a Fin locality would take in the mouth of a Lithuanian would not be _F_insk but _M_insk, or _P_insk, and these are the names we find on what I think was, at one time, the Finno-Lithuanic frontier.

I should add that the _Kour-_ in _Kour_-sk seems to be the _Kour-_ in _Kour_-land, the _Kor-_ in _Kor_-alli (a Fin population of the Middle Ages), and the _Car-_ in the eminently, and almost typically, Fin _Kar_elians.

This is not much in the way of evidence. Much or little, however, it is more than can be got for any other population. Much or little it is got at by a very cursory investigation. No special research has been instituted. No tumulus has been appealed to. No local dialect has been analysed. No ordnance map has been pored over. All this will, doubtless, be done in time, and if, when it has been done, no confirmation of the present doctrine be found, the propounder will reconsider it. If the evidence point elsewhere he will abandon it. At present he brings the early Fin frontier to Minsk and Pinsk:

There it touched that of the Lithuanians. To make these the most eastern members of the Sarmatian stock is, at the first view, to fly in the face of the testimony of their present position. They are, in one sense, the most western. The Germans of Prussia touch them on the side of Europe. Between them and the Fins of Asia, the vast Russian area of the Governments of Smolensko, Novogorod &c. intervene. Speaking laxly, one may say that all Russia lies beyond them. Nevertheless, it is with the Fins of Estonia that they are also in contact; whilst the explanation of the German and Russian contact is transparently clear. The Germans (as a matter of history) cut their way through whole masses of Slavonians in Pomerania, before they reached them; so displacing the Slavonians to the west of them. The Russians (again a matter of history) pressed up to them by a circuit from the south and west. The Lithuanians have kept their position--but one population has stretched beyond, and another has pressed up to them. Their language is eminently akin to the Sanskrit. Their physiognomy is the most Fin of any thoroughly European population.

There were no Slavonians, _in situ_, to the East of the Lithuanic area; none originally. By encroachment and change of place there are, in later times, many. There are, as aforesaid, all the Russians of the present moment. The question, however, before us is the original area, the primordial _situs_.

The westward extension of the Lithuanians is a matter upon which I do not press the details. I think that the Vistula may have been to them and the Slavonians what the Rhine was to the Gauls and Germans. The main question is how far can we bring them south? What justifies us in making them reach the Carpathians? At present we find them in Livonia, Courland, East Prussia, Vilna, and Grodno; but further south than Grodno nowhere; nowhere, at least, with the definite characteristics of name and language. Every inch that is given them south of Grodno must have its proper evidence to support it.

The Gothini of Tacitus are the first population that we may make Lithuanic. What says Tacitus? They were not Germans; their language proved this. They were not Sarmatians. The Sarmatians imposed a tribute upon, as on men of another stock--_tributa ut alienigenis imponunt_. The Quadi did the same. If neither Germans nor Sarmatians what were they? Members of a stock now extinct? The rule against the unnecessary multiplication of causes forbids us to resort to this supposition. Do so once and we may always be doing it. Were they Fins? Say that they were, and what do we gain by it? We may as well prolong the Lithuania area from Grodno as the Fin from Pinsk. Nay, better. That Grodno is Lithuanian we _know_. That Pinsk was Fin we _infer_. Were they Scythians? We know of no Scythians beyond the Maros; so that the reasoning which told against the Fin hypothesis tells equally against the Turk. Beyond the Germans, the Slavonians, the Fins, the [6]Turks, and the Lithuanians we have nothing to choose from; and I submit that the _minimum_ amount of assumption lies with the population last named.

[Footnote 6: The term _Turk_ is used in its wide Ethnological sense, and includes the _Scythæ_.]

Now comes the name of their Language. The Language of the Gothini was _Gallica_--Osos Pannonica, Gothinos _Gallica_ arguit non esse Romanos. I have given reasons elsewhere (Germania of Tacitus with Ethnological notes) for translating Gallica Gallician,--not Gallic. Say, however, that the latter is the better translation; Gothini would still be the name of the people.

There is a country, then, of the Gothini sufficiently far south to be in contact with the Quadi and Sarmatæ--the Quadi in Moravia and Upper Hungary, the Sarmatæ in the parts between the Theiss and the Danube. Gallicia meets these conditions. It was a mining country. Gallicia is this. It was on the Upper Vistula--probably at its head-waters. At the _mouth_ of the same river the name re-appears, in that of the _Goth_ones, _Gutt_ones, _Gyth_ones &c. of the Amber country. These were either the nearest neighbours of the Aestyii, or the Aestyii themselves under a name other than German--for Aestyii is an undoubted German gloss, just like _Est-_ in _Est-_ onia.

Are we justified in identifying these two populations on the strength of the name? No. What we _are_ justified in doing, however, is this. We are justified in placing on the frontier of both a language in which the root _Goth-_ was part of a national name.

At the beginning of the historical period these Gothones were the Lithaunians of East Prussia, and their neighbours called them _Guddon_. They were the congeners of those Lithuanians whose area, even now, extents as far south as Grodno.

It is easy to connect the Gothones with Grodno; but what connects Grodno with Gothinian Gallicia? What _can_ connect it now? All is Polish or Russian. What are the proofs that it was not so from the beginning? The following--the populations between Grodno and the frontier of Gallicia, appear, for the first time in history in the 13th century; but not as Poles, nor yet as Russians, but as Lithuanians--"cum _Pruthenica_ et _Lithuanica_ lingua habens magna ex parte similitudinem et intelligentiam"--"lingua, ritu, religione, et moribus magnam habebat cum _Lithuanis_, _Pruthenis_ et _Samogitis_" (the present Lithuanians of East Prussia) "conformitatem".

We cannot bring these quite down to Gallicia; and this is not to be wondered at. The first notice we have of them is very nearly the last as well. The narrative which gives us the preceding texts is the narrative of their subjugation and extinction.

What was the name of this people? I premise that we get it through a double medium, the Latin, and the Slavonic--the latter language always being greatly disguised in its adaptation to the former. The commonest form is Jaczwingi (Lat.) Jatwyazi (Slavonic); then (in documents) _Getuin_-zitæ, a word giving the root _Gothon-_. Finally, we have "Pollexiani _Getharum_ seu Prussorum gens".

Such are the reasons for connecting the Gothini of the Marcomannic frontier with the Gothini of the Baltic, and also for making both (along with the connecting Jaczwingi) Lithuanians. This latter point, however, is unessential to the present investigation; which simply considers the area of the Slavonians. For the parts north of the Carpathians, it was limited by a continuous line of _Gothini_, _Getuinzitæ_, and _Gothones_. Whatever those were they were not Slavonic.

Such is the sketch of the chief reasons for believing that originally the Vistula (there or thereabouts) was the boundary of the Slavonians on the North East; a belief confirmed by the phenomena of the languages spoken, at the present moment, beyond that river. They fall into few dialects; a fact which is _prima facie_ evidence of recent introduction. The Polish branch shews itself in varieties and subvarieties on its western frontier; the Russian on its southern and south-eastern. The further they are found East and North, the newer they are.

I may add that I find no facts in the special ethnology of the early Poles, that complicate this view. On the contrary, the special facts, such as they are, are confirmatory rather than aught else of the western _origin_ and the eastern _direction_, of a Polish line of encroachment, migration, occupancy, displacement, invasion, or conquest. Under the early kings of the blood of Piast (an individual wholly unhistoric), the locality for their exploits and occupancies is no part of the country about the present capital, Warsaw; but the district round Posen and Gnesen; this being the area to which the earliest legends attach themselves.

Where this is not the case, where the Duchy of Posen or Prussian Poland does not give us the earliest signs of Polish occupancy, the parts about Cracow do. At any rate, the legends lie in the west and south rather than in the east; on the Saxon or the Bohemian frontier rather than the Lithuanic.

The Slavonic area south of the Carpathians gives us a much more complex question--one, indeed, too complex to investigate it in all its bearings.

That there were both Slavonians and Lithuanians in Dacia, Lower Mœsia, Thrace, and, even, Macedon is nearly certain--and that early. Say that they were this at the beginning of the historical period. It will, by no means, make them aboriginal.

Such being the case I limit myself to the statement that, at the beginning of the historical period, the evidence and reasoning that connects the Thracians with the Getæ, the Getæ with the Daci, and the Daci with the Sarmatian stock in general is sufficient. Whether it makes them indigenous to their several areas is another question. It is also another question whether the relationship between them was so close as the current statements make it. These identify the Getæ and Daci. I imagine that they were (there or thereabouts) as different as the Bohemians and the Lithuanians--the Getic Lithuanians, and the Dacian (Daci = Τζαχοι) Czekhs; both, however being Sarmatian.

I also abstain from the details of a question of still greater importance and interest viz: the extent to which a _third_ language of the class which contains the Slavonian and Lithuanic may or may not have been spoken in the parts under notice. There was room for it in the parts to the South of the Fin, and the east of the Lithuanic, areas. There was room for it in the present Governments of Podolia, and Volhynia, to say nothing of large portions of the drainage of the Lower Danube. The language of such an area, if its structure coincided with its geographical position would be liker the Lithuanic and the most eastern branch of the Slavonic than any other Languages of the so-called Indo-European Stock. It would also be more Sarmatian than either German or Classical. Yet it would be both Classical and German also, on the strength of the term Indo-European. It would be the most Asiatic of the tongues so denominated; with some Ugrian affinities, and others with the languages in the direction of Armenia, and Persia. It would be a language, however, which would soon be obliterated; in as much as the parts upon which we place it were, at an early date, overrun by Scythians from the East, and Slavonians from the West. When we know Volhynia, it is Turk, and Polish,--anything but aboriginal. Such a language, however, might, in case the populations who spoke it had made early conquests elsewhere, be, still, preserved to our own times. Or it might have been, at a similarly early period, committed to writings; the works in which it was embodied having come down to us. If so, its relations to its congeners would be remarkable. _They_ would only be known in a modern, _it_ only in an ancient, form. Such being the case the original affinity might be disguised; especially if the transfer of the earlier language had been to some very distant and unlikely point.

I will now apply this hypothetical series of arguments. 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 or 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 the distant and disconnected Lithuanian.

As to the Lithuanian, it has, of course, its closest affinities with the Slavonic tongues of Russia, Bohemia, Poland, and Servia, as aforesaid. And 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 the Lithuanic is more or less connected with them.

Now, the botanist who, found in Asia, extended over a comparatively small area, a single species, belonging to a genus which covered two-thirds of Europe (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) would pronounce the _genus_ to be European. The zoologist, in a case of zoology, would do the same.

_Mutatis mutandis_, the logic of the philologue should be that of the naturalist. Yet it is not.

1. The area of Asiatic languages in Asia allied to the ancient Language of India, 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 Indian division only; whereas in Europe it falls into three divisions, each of, at least, equal value with the single Asiatic one.

Nevertheless, the so-called Indo-European languages are deduced from Asia.

I do not ask whether, as a matter of fact, this deduction is right or wrong. I only state, as a matter of philological history, that it is made, adding that the hypothesis which makes it is illegitimate. It rests on the assumption that it is easier to bring a population from India to Russia than to take one from Russia to India. In the case of the more extreme language of which it takes cognisance this postulate becomes still more inadmissible. It assumes, in the matter of the Keltic (for instance), that it is easier to bring the people of Galway from the Punjab, than the tribes of the Punjab from Eastern Europe. In short, it seems to be a generally received rule amongst investigators, that so long as we bring our migration from east to west we may let a very little evidence go a very long way; whereas, so soon as we reverse the process, and suppose a line from west to east, the converse becomes requisite, and a great deal of evidence is to go but a little way. The effect of this has been to create innumerable Asiatic hypotheses and few or no European ones. Russia may have been peopled from Persia, or Lithuania from Hindostan, or Greece from Asia, or any place west of a given meridian from any place east of it--but the converse, never. No one asks for proofs in the former case; or if he do, he is satisfied with a very scanty modicum: whereas, in the latter, the best authenticated statements undergo stringent scrutiny. Inferences fare worse. They are hardly allowed at all. It is all "theory and hypothesis" if we resort to them in cases from west to east; but it is no "theory" and no "hypothesis" when we follow the sun and move westwards.

Let the two lines be put on a level, and let ethnographical philology cease to be so one-sided as it is. Let the possibility of a Western origin of the Sanskrit language take its natural place as the member of an alternative hitherto ignored. I do not say what will follow in the way of historical detail. I only say (in the present paper at least) that the logic of an important class of philological questions will be improved. As it stands at present, it is little more than a remarkable phenomenon in the pathology of the philological mind, a symptom of the morbid condition of the scientific imagination of learned men.

Turning westwards we now take up the Slovenians of Carinthia and Styria on their western frontier, not forgetting the southermost of the Czekhs of Bohemia. How far did the Slavonic area extend in the direction of Switzerland, Gaul, and Italy?

In the Tyrol we have such geographical names as Scharn-_itz_, Gsh_nitz_-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 other than Slavonic.

Again--a Slavonic population in the Vorarlberg and Southern Bavaria best accounts for the name _Vind_-elicia.

If the Slavonians are aboriginal, and if the Czekhs are the same, the decisive evidence that, within the historical period, they have both receded is in favor of their respective areas having originally been greater than they are at present. Such being the case, we may bring them both further south and further west. How far? This is a question of minute detail, not to be answered off-hand. The rule of parsimony, however, by which we are forbidden to multiply stocks unnecessarily, carries them to the frontier of the Gauls in one direction, and the Italians on the other.

If so, there may have been Slavonians on the frontier of Liguria. More than this the Rhæti may have been Slavonic also. But many make the Etruscans Rhætian. Is it possible however, that even the Etruscans were Slavonic?

I know of numerous _opinions_ against their being so. I know of no _facts_.

ON THE TERMS OF _GOTHI_ AND _GETÆ_.

OBSERVATIONS LAID BEFORE THE ETHNOLOGICAL SECTION, AT THE MEETING OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE, HELD AT BIRMINGHAM 1849.

So far from the Gothi and Getæ being identical there is no reason to believe that any nation of Germany ever bore the former of these two names until it reached the country of the population designated by the latter. If so, the Goths were Gothic, just as certain Spaniards are Mexican and Peruvian; and just as certain Englishmen are Britons _i.e._ not at all.

The Goths of the Danube, etc. leave Germany as Grutungs and Thervings, become Marcomanni along the Bohemian and Moravian frontiers, Ostrogoths and Visigoths, on the Lower Danube (or the land of the Getæ), and Mœsogoths (from the locality in which they become Christian) in Mœsia.

What were the Goths of Scandinavia? _It is not I who am the_ first by many scores of investigators to place all the numerous populations to which the possible modifications of the root _G--t_ apply in the same category. I only deny that that category is German. Few separate the Jutes of Jutland, from the Goths of Gothland. Then there is the word _Vitæ_; which is to _Gut-_, as _Will_-iam is to _Gul_-ielmus, a form that was probably Lithuanic.

If _J_+_t_, as it occurs in the word _Jute_, be, really, the same as the _G_+_t_ in _Got_ or _Goth_, we have a reason in favour of _one_ of the earlier Danish populations having been Lithuanic.