The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

POLAND. 217Ethnical Elements.— Polish Character.According to Kopemicki, Poland was inhabited in the bronze and iron agesby a dolichoeephalous race quite distinct from the modern brachycepkalousinhabitants. Nevertheless, since the dawn of written history in the Vistularegions, the country has been occupied by Slav tribes, the progenitors of thepresent Poles, and the same stock was spread over the neighbouring western landsnow held by Germans or Teutonised Slavs. These Lech or Polish tribes wereclearly distinguished from the eastern Slavs.They recognised a common kinship,but according to the old legend the three brothers Lech, Czech, and Pus livedapart, each working out his own destiny. In Poland the name of Lech is nowmerely a literary expression unknown to the people.The purest Poles are said to be the inhabitants of " Great Poland ;" that is, ofthe present Poland on both banks of the Vistula, and of Poznania on the Warta.The fair Mazurs, found chiefly in the eastern and northern districts, are theproudest of all the Poles, and have best preserved the old national customs.brown Cracovians, Sandomirians, and Lublinians of the south are more sensitiveand quick-tempered than the Mazurs, and also perhaps more vain, to judge atleast from their graceful and somewhat gaudy national dress.Amongst the inhabitants of different origin from the Poles, a large portionhave adopted the national speech and customs. Thus the Kuprikes, or " Men ofthe Spade," scattered over various northern and north-eastern districts, havebecome sufficiently assimilated to the Mazurs to be often confounded with them,though really descendants of the Yatvaghes, or Yadzvinghes, supposed to havebeen a Lithuanian race partly exterminated by the Poles. The Little Russiansforming separate communities in the south-east, west of the Bug, are scarcely tobe distinguished from their Eussian neighbours of Volhynia. Some 250,000 or300,000 Lithuanians occupy the greater part of the government of Suvalki in thenorth-east, and several thousand Gipsies and Tatars are scattered over the country.After the Mongolian irruption the princes, and especially the bishops andconvents, invited German settlers to repeople the devastated lands, granting themgreat privileges, such as the right of naming their own Schultze, and self-governmentaccording to the " Teutonic right." Several towns were also founded by Germancolonists, most of which were governed according to the " "Magdeburg right ;that is, of one of the oldest German municipalities, whose archbishops had formerlybeen the primates of the Polish Church.TheBut these privileges did not prevent theGermans of the towns from gradually becoming assimilated to the Poles, hke thoseof the rural districts. In the fourteenth century several hundred thousand" Swabians " were settled in Poland, but all have been absorbed, and of 2,000Protestant parishes existing in the sixteenth century, two only survived till 1775.All the Protestants, usually supposed to represent these immigrants, and nowreckoned as Germans, have arrived within the last hundred years.** Nationalities in Poland, 1873 (according to Rittich) :—Poles, 4,575,S36, or 68'41 per cent. ; Jews,S60,327, or 13-45 per cent. ; Russians, 511,980, or 852 per cent. ; Germans, 370,356, or 579 per cent.Lithuanians, 241,147, or 3-77 per cent.s 2