The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

218 EUSSIA IN EUROPE.more civilised than are now the TJgrian tribes of East Russia and Siberia.Theylived chiefly on the chase and fishing, possessing no more than a rudimentaryknowledge of agriculture, and unacquainted even with the art of preparing butterand cheese from the milk of their own flocks.Their religion, analogous to that ofthe Lapps and Samoyeds, seems to have been a sort of fetishism mingled with theshamanist practices of the Mongolians. They relied more on the virtue of spellsthan the sword, and the poetic fancy inspired by their lonely solitudes was stillfurther stimulated by an excessive nervous sensitiveness, easily rising to ecstasy.The Tavastians have little poetic genius, and are seldom heard to sing, whereas,besides their religious incantations, the Karelians possess a store of national song,transmitted orally from age to age, and now embodied in the national epic knownas the Kalcvala, or " Land of Kaleva," the giant god. Some of these songs wererevealed by Schroter and Topelius, but they were first collected in one body ofpoetry by Elias Lonnrot in 1835, and later on translated into Swedish by Castren.The second edition of 1849, double the size of the first, consists of five runot, orcantos, making altogether 22,800 lines, all except the fiftieth dating from pagantimes.The poetic language of the Finns is remarkably soft, harmonious, and rich.Lonnrot's dictionary contains no less than 200,000 words, including derivations." Turanian " in speech, and probably also in origin, the Finns yield in no respectto their neighbours, and their ambition is to take their place as equals amongst theEuropean peoples.They are on the whole certainly more active, thrifty, and especiallymore honest than the surrounding races, and Russian writers praise their endurance,probity, and self-respect. Their good qualities may be partly ascribed to therelative degree of freedom they have long enjoyed.During the Swedish rule theyshared in all civil and political rights, and most of the peasantry retained possessionof the soil. At present nearly all can read and write, but the passion for drinkhas kept many, especially in the north, still in a barbarous state. Distress is alsochronic in several districts, and famine has often decimated the land. When coldand wet summers prevent the crops from ripening before the autumn frosts, wantfollows inevitably amongst the rural classes. Then they are often reduced to eatstraw, or the bark of trees, mixing corn flour with "mountain flour," a sort ofmeal composed of dried infusoria gathered on the beds of old lakes. In 1868one-fourth of the people in some districts perished of hunger, and the deaths werethree times in excess of the births throughout the land.The blind are more numerous in Finland than in any other European countryexcept Iceland.There were 4,000 stone blind in 1873, besides over 4,000 partiallyso. This is ascribed in part to their smoky huts, vapour baths, and stoves used inheating the places where they dry and thresh their corn.A portion of the country is exclusively occupied by the descendants of the oldSwedish invaders, whom the Finns call Ruotsaliiiset. The Aland Islands have beenentirely Swedish since the twelfth century, and the Swedish colonisation of themainland began in the middle of the next century, after the conquests of BirgerJarl. The Swedes now occupy besides some of the Abo Islands, the coast landssouth of Gamla Karleby, and a strip 18 miles long west of the village of