The Races of the Danube, 233 



mixture with various strains of Tataric blood. 

 Napoleon's witticism, however, that you need only 

 scratch a Russian to get at the Tatar underneath, 

 contained little more wisdom than is usually to be 

 found in such smart sayings based on hasty gen- 

 eralization from inadequate and half-understood 

 data. On the whole, the principal intermixture 

 of the Slavs has been with their nearest congeners 

 and neighbours, the Teutons. Slavonic tribes, 

 pushing their way far into the centre of Europe, 

 still hold Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, while 

 further south, in Carinthia and Istria, the Slav 

 country comes up close to the Tyrol and to Ven- 

 ice. 



In the Middle Ages, this border region, from 

 the head of the Adriatic to the mountains of Bo- 

 hemia, was the seat of everlasting war ; and such 

 immense numbers of the eastern invaders were 

 captured from time to time and sold into slav- 

 ery in all parts of Germany that their national 

 name became the common appellative for wretches 

 doomed to involuntary servitude. Such seems to 

 have been the origin of our English word " slave." 

 Until lately it was supposed that the vernacular 

 meaning of the national name was " the glorious," 

 as slava is a common word for " glory " in most 

 of the Slavonic languages; and frequent comment 



