12 Ethnographical Memoir on the Nations of Slavonian Race. 



comparatively late period. An opinion indeed long prevailed among the 

 catholic Slavonians of Servia and Dalmatia, that the Slavic letters, termed 

 the Glagolitic alphabet, were invented for their use by St. Jerom. It was 

 pretended that this father of the church, who was a native of Dalmatia, 

 contrived for the use of his countrymen an alphabet, and instituted the 

 Slavonic liturgy. It has likewise been conjectured, that the old pagan 

 Slavi were acquainted from ancient times with the use of Runes. Both of 

 these opinions are groundless : they have been refuted by the ex-jesuit 

 Dobrowsky. As this writer is allowed by all competent judges to be the 

 most profound and accurate investigator of the Slavonic history and an- 

 tiquities, I shall extract some observations on the origin of writing, and on 

 the conversion of the Slavi, which are contained in his work, entitled 

 " Geschichte der Bbhmischen Sprache und illtern Literatur." " Before the 

 fortunate invention of the Slavonic alphabet, az, buki, wiedi, glagol, dobro> 

 &c., says this writer, by the philosophic Constantine, otherwise named 

 Cyrill, the art of writing was entirely unknown to the Slavi." The adop- 

 tion of Runic letters on the shores of the Baltic does not reach so far back 

 as to allow of the supposition, that the pagan priests at Rlietra and other 

 places, had written the names of their deities with runes, long before the 

 time of Cyrill. On this subject, Dobrowsky refers his readers to the work 

 of Hufprediger Masch on the Antiquities of the Obotrites ; from which I 

 shall make some copious extracts in the concluding part of this paper. 

 " They may, perhaps, first have borrowed these characters from the Danes 

 and Swedes, in the ninth or tenth century. Our Stransky dreamt, indeed, 

 of a Ruthenish, i. e. old Russian mode of writing, supposed to have been 

 used by the old pagan Bohemians ; but no other Ruthenian character can 

 have been known before the invention of the Cyrillian, which was termed 

 by some Ruthenian, and by others Bulgarian, because it may be confidently 

 asserted that the Russians first learned to read the Slavonian church-books 

 and letters in the tenth century. The Glagolites in Dalmatia, during the 

 first half of the thirteenth century, pretended that they had their glagoU, 

 or letters from their supposed countryman, the celebrated St. Jerom, and 

 therefore termed their bukvica, the Hieronymiau alphabet j but in the time 

 of St. Jerom, there were no Slavonian people on the borders of Pannonia 

 and Dalmatia, or near Stridon, where that illustrious father of the church 

 was born." The pretence of referring this invention to St. Jerom, was an 

 ingenious device of some ecclesiastic in Croatia, vvlio, after JVlethodius and 

 the old Slavonian formularies, had been condemned as heretical by the 

 synod at Spalatro, in 1068, the people being still attached to their ac- 

 customed service, altered, about the end of the twelfth century, the alphabet 

 of Cyrill, and gave it out as an invention of St. Jerom ; who, having been 

 born in Dalmatia, was feigned to have constructed it, as well as the liturgy 

 sanctioned by the Latin church. The result was, that in after times, there 

 were two Slavonic alphabets, the Cyrillian and the Glagolitic, or Hierony- 



