Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/746

724 and away to the northeast. This brings us to Asia, with its terrific extremes o£ continental climate, with its barren steppes, its slit-eyed Mongols, and its nomadic and imperfect culture.

A word must be said, before we proceed to the physical anthropology of Russia, as to the languages which are spoken there. The true Russians form about one half the population of the European portion of the country; the rest are Letto-Lithuanians, of whom we shall speak in a moment, Poles, Jews, Finns, and Mongols, with a sprinkling of Germans. The true Russians are divided into three groups of very unequal size. These are said to differ not only in language, but in temperament as well. About fifty of the seventyodd millions of them, known as Great Russians, occupy the entire center, north, and east of the country. These are the "Muscovites," their historic center being in the ancient capital city of Moscow. Next in numbers come the people of Little Russia, or Ukraine, which, as our maps show, inhabits the governments of the southwest, up against Galicia. They in turn center politically in Kiev, covering a wedge-shaped territory, with its point lying to the east in Kharkov and Voronesh. The Cossacks, who extend down around the Sea of Azof into the Kuban, are linguistically Little Russians also. The third group, known as the White Russians, only four million souls in number, is found in the four governments shown on our maps, extending from Poland up and around Lithuania. This White Russian territory is flat, swampy, and heavily forested, in strong contrast to the fertile, open Black Mold belt of Little Russia. In topography and in the meagerness of its soil White Russia is akin to the sandy Baltic provinces from Lithuania north. Linguistically, the White and Great Russians are closely allied; the dialect of the Little Russians is considerably differentiated from them both. This is probably due to the Tatar invasions from the east across middle Russia. In face of these the Great Russians withdrew toward Moscow; the White Russians took refuge in their inhospitable swamps and forests, while the population of the Ukraine was left to itself at the south.

Entirely distinct from the Slavs in language is the Letto-Lithuanian people, which, to the number of three million or more, occupies the territory between the White Russians and the Baltic Sea extending down into northern Prussia, Their speech, in the comparative isolation of this inhospitable region—an isolation which made them the last people in Europe to accept Christianity—is the most archaic member of the great Aryan or inflectional family. Standing between Slavic and Teutonic, it is more primitive than