in this great plain country; they have taken on and put off customs, language, and religion time and again, according to circumstances. The latter characteristic, religion, in fact, affords us a far better standard for ethnic classification than language, for the Finns have persisted in Christianity, the Turks and Tatars have held to Mohammedanism, and the Mongols proper to Buddhism, with a remarkable constancy. The varying proportions of barbarism in each group are well illustrated by this fact; for in race, as in religion, the Finns are truly indigenous to western Europe, the Tatar-Turks are Oriental, while the Mongols proper are Asiatic.
The evils incident to any linguistic classification of the aborigines in Russia are best illustrated by a comparison of the Lapps with the Livs, Eths, and Tchouds of the Baltic provinces; both groups alike speak Finnic languages; the philologists, therefore, from Castren to Mikkola, class them as alike members of a Finnic "race," along with the Magyars or Hungarians, who are also Finnic in speech. Nothing could be more absurd than to assert a community of physical origin for the three. The Magyars, among the finest representatives of a west European type, are no more like the Lapps than the Australian Bushmen; and the Baltic Finns are equally distinct. The Lapps, as our portraits illustrate, are among the broadest-headed people in the world.[1] Their squat faces show it. In stature they are among the shortest of the human species. Virchow's celebrated hypothesis that they are a "pathological race" seems excusable on this ground. Their hair and eyes are very dark brown, often black. Could any type of human beings be further removed from this than the Finns described to us by G. Retzius, Bonsdorff, Eliséef, or Mainof? These latter are among the tallest of men, with fair skin, flaxen or tow-colored hair, and blue eyes. Turn to our map on the next page. It shows us among the Esths, on the Baltic coast, through the Cheremisse on the Volga, and clear beyond the Ural Mountains among Ostiaks and Voguls in Siberia, a long-headedness not a whit less pronounced than throughout Teutonic Germany. The contrast of tints on our map corresponds to a radical contrast of physical type.
Turning to the Russian aborigines, then, with an eye single to their purely physical characteristics, we may relegate them to two groups, sharply distinguished in isolation, but intermixed along their lines of contact. Our map of cephalic index herewith will roughly
- ↑ Sommier, Kelsief, Kharuzin, Garson, and others have studied them in detail.
his work, and Keane, 1886, and in his Ethnology, 1896, pp. 803 et seq., are equally at sea. Since the days of Nilsson and Prichard, the philologists have befogged the questions of physical descent. Niederle, 1896, in his appendix upon the subject, seems to be very confused. Topinard, Anthropology, p. 465, has alone avoided the prime difficulty.
