724 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and away to tlie northeast. This brings lis to Asia, with its terrific 

 extremes o£ continental climate, with its barren steppes, its slit-eyed 

 Mongols, and its nomadic and imperfect culture. 



A word must be said, before we proceed to the physical anthro- 

 pology of Russia, as to the languages which are spoken there. 

 The true Russians form about one half tlie population of the Euro- 

 pean portion of the country ; the rest are Letto-Lithuanians, of whom 

 we shall speak in a moment, Poles, Jews, Finns, and Mongols, with 

 a sprinkling of Germans. The true Russians are divided into three 

 groups of very unequal size.* These are said to differ not only in 

 language, but in temperament as well. About fifty of the seventy- 

 odd millions of them, known as Great Russians, occupy the entire 

 center, north, and east of the country. These are the " Muscovites," 

 their historic center being in the ancient capital city of Moscow. 

 ISText in numbers come the people of Little Russia, or Ukraine, which, 

 as our maps show, inhabits the governments of the southwest, up 

 against Galicia. They in turn center politically in Kiev, cover- 

 ing a wedge-shaped territory, with its point lying to the east in 

 Kharkov and Voronesh. The Cossacks, who extend down around 

 the Sea of Azof into the Kuban, are linguistically Little Russians 

 also. The third group, known as the White Russians, only four 

 million souls in number, is found in the four governments shown 

 on our maps, extending from Poland up and around Lithuania. 

 This White Russian territory is flat, swampy, and heavily forested, 

 in strong contrast to the fertile, open Black Mold belt of Little 

 Russia. In topography and in the meagerness of its soil White 

 Russia is akin to the sandy Baltic provinces from Lithuania north. 

 Linguistically, the White and Great Russians are closely allied; the 

 dialect of the Little Russians is considerably differentiated from 

 them both. This is probably due to the Tatar invasions from the 

 east across middle Russia. In face of these the Great Russians with- 

 drew toward Moscow; the White Russians took refuge in their in- 

 hospitable swamps and forests, while the population of the Ukraine 

 was left to itself at the south. 



Entirely distinct from the Slavs in language is the Letto-Lithu- 

 anian people, which, to the number of three million or more, occupies 

 the territory between the White Russians and the Baltic Sea ex- 

 tending down into northern Prussia, f Their speech, in the com- 

 parative isolation of this inhospitable region — an isolation which 

 made them the last people in Europe to accept Christianity — is the 

 most archaic member of the great Aryan or inflectional family. 

 Standing between Slavic and Teutonic, it is more primitive than 



* Rittich, 1878 b, has mapped their distribution in minute detail. 

 \ Miischner and Virchow, 1891, have studied these Prussians. 



