PREFACE. ix 



apology and defence may be allowed me. Some of the 

 forms I cannot justify Peccavi! In other cases I have 

 followed British usage: Abo is as defensible as is Vienna; 

 further, the dipthongs " a " and " a " are forms with which 

 English readers are not acquainted, and I had to exercise 

 my discretion in rendering words in which these occurred. 

 I find that in doing so I have failed to maintain unifor- 

 mity, which I now regret ; and in other cases I have 

 given in quotations the forms of names and words 

 employed by the writers cited ; but I do not suppose 

 that in any case an English reader will be misled to 

 anything like the extent to which he would be were he 

 to give in France his English pronunciation of Calais or 

 Paris. 



Amongst those which I cannot defend is the form which 

 I have given to the word Svedjande in some of the earlier 

 sheets ; this I have corrected on page 55, but I still 

 find it more natural, both in speaking and in writing, to 

 make use of the corrupted form. A more serious correc- 

 tion refers to the account I have given (p. 48) of the 

 waterfall at Tammerfors, which shows that either I must 

 have misunderstood my informant, or that he must have 

 misunderstood the information communicated to him. 

 Dr. Blomqvist informs me that there is not there a per- 

 pendicular water-fall 100 feet in height, but only a rapid. 



Again, I have spoken of Finland as a Province of Russia. 

 I am informed that it would have been more cbrrect to 

 have called it a Grand Duchy united to Russia. In 

 Russia the term corresponding to " province " is oblast ; 

 but if we retranslate oblast into English, the synonym is 

 not " province " but territory, as that term is employed in 

 the United States, an extensive region subject to law, 



