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 i is as defensible as is Vienna ; 
further, the dipthongs “a” and “4” 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 . 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, 
Tam informed that it would have been more correct to 
have called it a Grand Duchy united to Russia. In 
Russia the term corresponding to “province” is oblast ; 
but if we retranslate od/ast into English, the synonym is 
not “province” but territory, as that term is employed in 
the United States,—an extensive region subject to law, 
