Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/131

 Rh altogether improbable. It is much easier to conceive the contrary to be the case.

If thus we have arrived at the conviction that the Slavs have not borrowed the plant or its name from the Germans, and that the former possessed it independentljj it is nov our duty to investigate some tracks which may lead us to the decision of a question, seemingly unimportant, but interesting as a page in the history of culture.

We will begin with a group of very easy words. In the Slav languages a state of ebriety, besides being denoted by the words upic sic, pijany, pyanstvovati (to drink, drunk,), and is also commonly expressed by words derived from chmiel (hops), comprising not only drunkenness arising from hops, but having the same general meaning as the former. Podchmiclie solie, pod chimelony means not only to be drunk with ale, but with any other liquid. The same in Bohemian: chmeliti nachmeliti, ochmelitise, means to get drunk; ochmela, drunkard. In Russian the words: pod, chmelkom, chmelem chmelek, and the old Slavian ochmelie have the same meaning. There exist more derivates of the same kind.

The hop must have been known a long time to the Slavs in order that words could be formed describing its peculiar action, and that these words could represent their idea so well as to supplant others already existing. We meet no such derivates in the German languages, although the hop is used on a large scale since the 9th century.

We have no means of proving the age of these expressions, but such proofs, perhaps, will be found in directing our investigations to the east. In the mean time in order to study the Polish documents, we must turn to folk-lore.

The hop must be a plant known well and long ago to our ancestors, if no wedding even now can take place among us without the song of the hop. No doubt it was sung beside the cradle of our nation. But not only with us, with all Slavs, we may say, the hop is the most ancient symbol of happiness, pleasure and joy, the ally of love and the patron of marriages.

In all the provinces of Poland the typical song of the hop is heard with innumerable variations. The principal parts remain the same everywhere. The following, for instance, is