Slavonians to the other Indo-European Nations, 31 
central focus, a sudden blaze of brilliant success, followed by a no less 
splendid era of material prosperity, are characteristics of the history 
of both nations, and more or less also of all the Ruthenian states. 
Then suddenly the glory of Bohemia fades, and the noble land of 
Ottocar and Huss sinks at last into a province of Austria, The fate 
of Bohemia has been harder than that of her sister nations, Czechian 
nationality has shown less vitality than either Polish, Russ, or Serb, 
Elsewhere the process of Slavonization has been at work assimilating 
and absorbing all alien elements. This property of the race was 
early noticed by the Byzantine writers, who coined for it the verb 
'^Xa/SovL^u). The cause of this power has excited much ethnological 
enquiry. Bandtkie attributes it to the charms and fertility of 
Slavonian females. I should be inclined to look deeper, in the fact 
of the Slavonians being one of the purest types of the Aryan race, 
and combining the characteristics of all its nations. These causes 
might explain the Slavonization of the Lithuanians, who have thus 
become 
" Ipsis Polonis Poloniores :" 
as well as of the German colonists in Poland, or of the Varegs or 
Scandinavians of Great Russia. It cannot however apply to the 
Uralian tribes that have become more or less Slavonized, both in 
language and religion, although their innate characteristics can be 
no more eradicated from the Turanian than from the Negro. 
This assimilation constitutes the strangest ethnological pheno- 
menon of our age, whereby 40 millions of Turanians, in Europe 
alone, are gradually losing their nationality. They once formed 
many great nations, the history, laws, customs, and mythologies of 
which have passed into oblivion. A few names alone remain of 
these extinct nations, as the Permians, the Moxols, the Tchermisses, 
the Tchuds, the Ugrians or Eastern Magyars, the Carelians, the 
Mordevians, the Ingrians, &c. &c. 
On the plains of the Upper Oka, east of Great Russia, dwelt two 
of these Turanian tribes, the Muromians and the Merians. They 
