600 ANNUAL EEPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



one body, fell into a number of separate parts. At the present time, 

 and even throughout the period covered by history, Slav people as 

 one national unit no longer exist; their place is occupied by a line of 

 more or less related Slavic nations. 



The details regarding the causes and progress of the above indi- 

 vidualization are problems that are still to a large extent unsolved. 

 It is most probable, however, that the original Slav people, the 

 nucleus of which occupied the region of the rivers Oder and Dnieper, 

 but who already in the prehistoric times were reaching in places to 

 the Elbe, Saal, and Donau, as well as to the Baltic Sea, fell gradually 

 apart into three primary groups. The first of these, to the west of 

 the Veser and the Carpathian Mountains, expanded still farther on 

 toward the west and became a branch of the Elbe, Pomeranian, 

 Polish, Bohemian and Slovak Slavs ; the second main branch, whose 

 original territory was most probably somewhere near the Upper 

 Vistula, the Dniester, and the central Donau, moved in the course of 

 time — with the exception of small remnants — to the south of the 

 Carpathian region and into the Balkans, separating secondarily into 

 the subdivisions of the Slovenians. Srbo-Chorvats (" Serbo-Croa- 

 tians"), and the Bulgarians. The third main branch of the Slavs 

 finally expanded from the lower Dnieper northward to the Gulf of 

 Finland, westward to the Don and Volga, and southward to the 

 Black Sea and Lower Donau, evolving eventually the Kussian 

 nation, which, due to various circumstances, became itself in differ- 

 ent localities somewhat heteromorphous. 



The degree in which various Slav groups differ from each other 

 to-day, while nowhere excessive, is not everywhere alike. Between 

 the Bohemian, for instance, and the Pole there is a greater gap than 

 between the Bohemian and the Slovak, and that between the Velkorus 

 (Great-Russian) and the Pole is also decidedly greater than that 

 between the former and the Malorus (Small-Russian). In conse- 

 quence of the less well-defined differences, we constantly meet, in 

 literature and elsewhere, with controversies as to which groups of 

 Slavs can be regarded as independent ethnic units or peoples, and 

 which can not be so regarded. Furthermore, these conditions give 

 rise to disputes in the application to the different groups of the 

 tenns nation, nationality, stem, branch, race, etc., and, finally, to 

 disputes concerning the number of present Slav nationalities or 

 peoples. There is no agreement in this regard, different classifica- 

 tions depending on different points of view, such as philological, 

 ethnographical, historical, or political; and even from one and the 

 same standpoint, such as the basis of language, different philologists 

 form unlike classifications. In many cases the tendencies at separa- 

 tion and individualization are given more weight than the actual 

 differences, while elsewhere political motives are responsible for the 



