312 
6. The Wends , their several Divisions and Religious Belief. 
The foregoing considerations respecting the nature and 
province of mythology, the unity of the human mind, of re- 
ligion, and of the Aryan race and its language, and the value 
to be placed upon the argument from General Consent, would 
not be strictly appropriate in a solely separate investigation 
into the special phases of the religion and mythology of the 
Aryans of Northern Europe. But as I am dealing with the 
subject from a comparative point of view, which indeed is its 
far most interesting and important aspect, it is absolutely 
necessary that these preliminary principles should be carefully 
borne in mind ; and it is also desirable that the paper should 
be considered in connection with my former one on The Reli- 
gion of Zoroaster .* * * § There, after a consideration of the Eastern 
Aryans, i.e., the Iranians and Yedic Indians, certain definite 
conclusions were arrived at ; and if those deductions be correct, 
a study of the north-western branch of the same great family 
must, in accordance with the principle of unity, furnish similar 
results. Should such be the case, it is obvious how greatly 
the prior argument and method of investigation is strength- 
ened and confirmed. 
The Wendsf and the Teutons form the two great divisions 
of the Aryans of Northern Europe, and the former are divided 
into the Letts and the Slavs. The Letts consist of the Lithua- 
nians and the inhabitants of Kurland and Livonia. Lithuanian 
is the language of a small portion of the inhabitants of East 
Prussia and of those of the adjoining part of Russia, and is akin 
to the old Prussian, which latter dialect became extinct in tbe 
seventeenth century. At the present time it employs some 
forms more closely resembling those of Sanskrit than the 
corresponding modes of expression in Greek and Latin 
and is more conservative in its retention of many primitive 
grammatical forms than even Sanskrit ”§ itself. The Slavs 
divide into three branches — Eastern, the Russians ; Western, 
the Poles, Bohemians, and Moravians ; and Southern, the Ser- 
vians, Bulgarians, Croats, etc. Of old non -Christian literature 
Wendic has none ; no writer of an Edda or a Veda, no Homer 
or Hesiod arose among them to compose theogonies and de- 
scribe the relative positions and the proper epithets of the 
* Vide sec. 2. 
+ “ Winidae being one of the most ancient and comprehensive names by 
which these tribes were known to the early historians of Europe ” (Prof. 
Max Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language , i. 226). 
I Lbid., 227. 
§ Kev. A. H. Sayce, Principles of Comparative Philology , 47. 
