56 Dr Prichard's Anniversary Address 



these nations, as well as for the social improvement and the 

 tranquillity of the civilised world, that the sway of the great 

 Northern Autocrat has been so long maintained over nearly 

 the whole aggregate of nations belonging to the Ugro-Tar- 

 tarian family, as well as over so great a portion of the Sla- 

 vonian race. To the patronage of science, for which the Im- 

 perial Government of Russia has always been remarkable, 

 must be attributed the progress already made in exploring 

 the literature of nations, which, until lately, were scarcely 

 known in Europe to possess any thing deserving that name. 

 For example, the literature of the Mongolians, although 

 their language had been cultivated, and they possessed a pe- 

 culiar alphabet, since the time of Kubilai, the grandson of 

 Tchinghis, was a complete blank, as far as Europeans were 

 concerned, till M. Schmidt of Moscow translated the his- 

 torical work of the Mongolian Khan Ssanang Setzen, of 

 which M. Abel Remusat thought it worth while to publish 

 an analysis. More recently, we have the commentaries of 

 M. Gabelentz on the literature of the Mantchu-Tartars. The 

 latest contribution to our knowledge of these nations and 

 their literary culture, is a memoir in the last volume of the 

 Berlin Abhandlungen, entitled, " ^Iteste Nachrichten von 

 Mongolen und Tartaren," by Professor Schott, already cele- 

 brated for his ingenious and most valuable researches into the 

 structure of this family of languages. 



The ethnology of the Caucasian nations (meaning the 

 tribes of people who inhabit the chain of Caucasus and the 

 adjoining lowlands, and not the European nations in general, 

 commonly, but with very questionable propriety, so termed), 

 has been a subject of research among German philologists, 

 and several memoirs have lately appeared on the languages of 

 these nations. The last volume of the Berlin Transactions 

 contains several papers on the same subject. Among them 

 is a memoir byHerr G. Rosen, "iiber die Ossetische Sprache." 

 The Ossetes are well known to be a branch of the Indo- 

 European stem, insulated among the Allophylian tribes of 

 the Caucasus. This was discovered, as I believe, by 

 Klaproth, whose information respecting the Ossetes was 

 otherwise very defective and erroneous. This people call 



