3. The country of the Neuri was bounded by a lake, at the head of the river Tyras. There are certain geographical difficulties here, which this is no time to investigate. A swamp or fen is a more likely explanation. With this meaning, the word is Ugrian; and, at the present moment, the town of Narym in Siberia means, in Ostiak, the Fens.
Then comes the Lithuanian question; upon which the reasoning is far more elaborate; consisting chiefly in the exposition of an undoubted fact, and the suggestion of a new interpretation of it. No two parts of the world are so distant but what they may illustrate each other’s ethnology; and, in the present case, the ancient geography of Kherson and the Crimea is explained by that of Persia, Cabul, and Hindostan.
It has long been known that the ancient, sacred, and literary language of Northern India has its closest grammatical affinities in Europe. With none of the tongues of the neighbouring countries, with no form of the Tibetan of the Himalayas, of the Burmese dialects of the north-east, with no Tamul dialect of the southern part of the Peninsula itself, has it half such close resemblances as it has with a distant and disconnected language spoken on the Baltic—the Lithuanian.
As to the Lithuanian, it has, of course, its closest affinities with the Slavonic tongues of Russia, Bohemia, Poland, and Servia, since the Slavonic and Lithuanic are two branches of the same Sarmatian stock. But when we go beyond the Sarmatian stock, and bring into the field of comparison the other tongues of Europe, the Latin, the Greek, the German, and the Keltic, we find that, though the Lithuanic is more or less clearly connected with all of them, it is, beyond comparison, far liker the old Indian or Sanskrit.
Such is the undoubted fact, for which there are many doubtful explanations. Of these, the most unscientific is the most current.
1. The area of Asiatic languages in Asia allied to the Sanskrit is smaller than the area of European languages allied to the Lithuanic; and—
2. The class or genus to which the two tongues equally belong, is represented in Asia by the Sanskritic division only; whereas in Europe it falls into three divisions, each of, at least, equal value with the single Asiatic one—the Gothic, the Sarmatian, the Classical (Latin and Greek)—to which, if we extend the value of the term “Indo-European,” the Keltic may be added.
The botanist who, finding in Asia, extended over a comparatively small area, a single species, belonging to a genus which covered two-thirds of Europe, should pronounce the genus to be Asiatic, would be in the same position as an ethnologist who should derive the Indo-European stock of languages from India. Except so far as he might urge that everything came from the East, and so convert the specific question into an hypothesis as to the origin of vegetation in general, he would forfeit his character as a botanical logician. Neither would the zoologist who, mutatis mutandis, deduced the larger from the smaller, the complex from the simple, fare much better. Now it is a sad truth, that what no naturalist could attempt, philologists and ethnologists do with complacency; for so general is the acquiescence in the Eastern origin of the Indo-European tongues, that the possibility of every phenomenon connected with the Sanskrit and its allied dialects in Asia being explicable by means of a simple Sarmatian conquest from Southern Russia seems never to have been entertained.
The only part, however, of this complicated question which requires further consideration in a work like the present, is the necessity of bringing the Lithuanic and Indian areas as near each other as possible; a necessity which, by itself, justifies the assumption of a southward extension of the former. Hence, in addition to their present districts, the governments of Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev, Kherson, and the Taurida, are assigned to it. From these, either as indigenæ, or as the invaders of a country originally Ugrian, they conquered certain portions of Asia, just as the Majiars conquered Hungary, and just as the Greeks, some centuries later, conquered Hindostan. Their language was what afterwards became known as the Sanskrit, the Zend, the Persepolitan, and the Pali. Their occupancy ended when that of the Skoloti began; and it began some time anterior to the date of the earliest Sanskrit record. Such is the hypothesis; one which will, probably, find more favour with the naturalist than with the scholar. A subordinate reason for bringing the Lithuanians beyond their present area, will be given when the ethnology of Gallicia comes under notice.
Russian Poland.—When domestic faction and foreign intrigue succeeded in effecting the partition of the ancient and powerful kingdom of Poland, it disturbed a hitherto natural division, by dividing the Lekh division of the Slavonic branch of the Sarmatian stock between Russia, Austria, and Prussia.