Are we justified in identifying these two populations on the strength of the name? No. What we are justified in doing, however, is this. We are justified in placing on the frontier of both a language in which the root Goth- was part of a national name.
At the beginning of the historical period these Gothones were the Lithaunians of East Prussia, and their neighbours called them Guddon. They were the congeners of those Lithuanians whose area, even now, extents as far south as Grodno.
It is easy to connect the Gothones with Grodno; but what connects Grodno with Gothinian Gallicia? What can connect it now? All is Polish or Russian. What are the proofs that it was not so from the beginning? The following—the populations between Grodno and the frontier of Gallicia, appear, for the first time in history in the 13th century; but not as Poles, nor yet as Russians, but as Lithuanians—"cum Pruthenica et Lithuanica lingua habens magna ex parte similitudinem et intelligentiam"—"lingua, ritu, religione, et moribus magnam habebat cum Lithuanis, Pruthenis et Samogitis" (the present Lithuanians of East Prussia) "conformitatem".
We cannot bring these quite down to Gallicia; and this is not to be wondered at. The first notice we have of them is very nearly the last as well. The narrative which gives us the preceding texts is the narrative of their subjugation and extinction.
What was the name of this people? I premise that we get it through a double medium, the Latin, and the Slavonic—the latter language always being greatly disguised in its adaptation to the former. The commonest form is Jaczwingi (Lat.) Jatwyazi (Slavonic); then (in documents) Getuin-zitæ, a word giving the root Gothon-. Finally, we have "Pollexiani Getharum seu Prussorum gens".
Such are the reasons for connecting the Gothini of the Marcomannic frontier with the Gothini of the Baltic, and also for making both (along with the connecting Jaczwingi) Lithuanians. This latter point, however, is unessential to the present investigation; which simply considers the area of the Slavonians. For the parts north of the Carpathians, it was limited by a continuous line of Gothini, Getuinzitæ, and Gothones. Whatever those were they were not Slavonic.
Such is the sketch of the chief reasons for believing that originally the Vistula (there or thereabouts) was the boundary of the Slavonians on the North East; a belief confirmed by the phenomena of the languages spoken, at the present moment, beyond that river. They fall into few dialects; a fact which is prima facie evidence of recent introduction. The Polish branch shews itself in varieties and subvarieties on its western frontier; the Russian on its southern and south-eastern. The further they are found East and North, the newer they are.
I may add that I find no facts in the special ethnology of the early Poles, that complicate this view. On the contrary, the special facts, such as they are, are confirmatory rather than aught else of the western origin and the eastern direction, of a Polish line of encroachment, migration, occupancy, displacement, invasion, or conquest. Under the early kings of the blood of Piast (an individual wholly unhistoric), the locality for their exploits and occupancies is no part of the country about the present capital, Warsaw; but the district round Posen and Gnesen; this being the area to which the earliest legends attach themselves.
Where this is not the case, where the Duchy of Posen or Prussian Poland does not give us the earliest signs of Polish occupancy, the parts about Cracow do. At any rate, the legends lie in the west and south rather than in the east; on the Saxon or the Bohemian frontier rather than the Lithuanic.
The Slavonic area south of the Carpathians gives us a much more complex question—one, indeed, too complex to investigate it in all its bearings.