736 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



from the tumuli wliicli are scattered all over Russia from tlie Car- 

 pathians almost to the Ural chain, and even beyond in Siberia. 

 These Kurgans, so called, are merely large mounds of earth from 

 twenty to fifty feet high, sometimes single, sometimes arranged in 

 series for miles. They are not unlike the simpler relics of our own 

 mound builders. The dead level of the country makes them in the 

 open prairies often of great service to herdsmen in tending their 

 flocks. These tumuli were found for the most part to date from the 

 stone age; no implements or ornaments of metal were unearthed in 

 them. The absence of weapons or utensils of war in the Kurgans 

 also denoted a peaceable folk. The population must have been con- 

 siderable, for these tumuli are simply innumerable. The men of 

 this prehistoric period betrayed a notable homogeneity of type, even 

 more uniform than that of the modern living population. The crania 

 were almost invariably of a pure, long-headed variety; the cephalic 

 indexes ranging as low or lower than that of the purest living 

 Teutonic peoples to-day. Remembering that the modern Rus- 

 sians are well up among the moderately broad-headed Europeans, 

 it will be seen what this discovery implied. jS^othing else was known 

 save that this extinct people were very tall, considerably above the 

 standard of the Russian mujik to-day. The most obvious explanation, 

 in view of the fact that Finnic place names occurred all over Russia, 

 was that these tumuli were the remains of an extinct substratum of 

 Finns, driven out or absorbed by the incoming Slavs. Their civiliza- 

 tion, made known to us by Uvarof, and more recently by Inos- 

 tranzef, was definitely connected with that of the Merian people, 

 so called by the historians. 



Soon a new and significant point began to be noted. While the 

 range of this primitive long-headed people, so different from the 

 living Russians, was distinctly set on the north and east, no definite 

 limits could be set to it toward the southwest. In the meanwhile 

 Kopernicky and others, from 1875 on, began to find evidence of the 

 same dolichocephalic stratum of population, underlying all the Slavs 

 in Podolia and Galicia.* Their track has been followed, entirely 

 antedating the modern Slavs, down into Bohemia and Moravia, by 

 Niederle f and Matiegka,^ and as far as Bosnia, where, in the great 

 discoveries at Glasinac,* the existence of this same aboriginal popula- 

 tion was abundantly proved. On the west, Lissauer followed it across 

 Prussia beyond the Vistula. 1 1 Thus on every side it was traced to the 



* Kohn and Mehlis, 18*79, give a complete resvnie of Kopernicky's results in an excellent, 

 work which seems to be little known. See especially vol. ii, pp. 108-110, 152, 153. 



f 1891a, 1894 a, p. 2'7'7, and best of all in his masterly work of 1896 a, pp. G'Z-VS, 

 where he gives data for all Slavic countries in detail. His paper in French, at the Moscow 

 Congress of 1892, gives a mere outline of the results obtained. Palliardi, 1894, deals with 

 Moravia also. X 1892 b, and 1894 a. * Gliick, 1897 c, p. 575. || 18V4-"78. 



