The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

LITHUANIA2G1seaboard between the Vistula and the Dvina. They reached far inland, as shownby the numerous Lithuanian names occurring especially in Vitebsk, and even oneof their tribes, the Golads, formerly occupied the Forotva, a tributary of theMoskva, west of Moscow.The Krivitchians of Smolensk are also supposed to be amixed Lithuanian and Slav people, and most Slav writers include in the samefamily the Yatvaghes, formerly on the Upper Xiemen and Bug.About Skidel,near Grodno, there are some communities now speaking White Russian, but witha Lithuanian accent, and otherwise distinguished from the White Russians bytheir brown complexion, black dress, and customs.from the Yatvaghes, although the Lithuanians are all fair.They are regarded as descendedDuring the devastating wars of the thirteenth century the very race itselfthreatened to disappear, or at least become absorbed in the surrounding elements.But although assailed on three sides at once by the more powerful Poles, Germans,and Russians, they were able to hold their ground, and while yielding in otherdirections, they seem to have somewhat encroached on the Finns in the north.several places, however, they became fused with the White Russians, and in allcases of such crossings the Slav element prevailed.Still the pure Lithuanian stock is yearly increasing.InFlanked on the north bytheir Lettish kindred, they form a compact mass of about 1,100,000 in an extensivetriangular territory, verging westwards on the Baltic, and limited south-east bythe irregular Vilna plateau.In the south and south-west the Lithuanian tongueis also current in a few tracts of Russia proper and East Prussia, and in half ofthe Polish government of Suwalki, raising the total number to nearly 1,500,000.The religious coincide on the whole with the ethnical limits. Wherever theRoman Catholic yields to the Orthodox Greek worship, the Lithuanians, mingledwith White Russians in speech, but probably Lithuanians in blood, are supplantedby Russian Slavs. Wherever Protestantism is uppermost the people are Germanor Lett, the influence of the Teutonic Lutherans having been paramount in Livonia.But in Lithuania the Roman Catholic Poles prevailed, and the Lithuanians areaccordingly members of the Roman Church.The Lithuanians, or Liituvininkai, are divided into two distinct nationalgroups—the Lithuanians properly so called, in the eastern districts of Vilna andRovno, and the Zeniadey Samogitians, or Jmudes, mainly on the German frontier.The two branches differ in speech as well as in national customs, though the twodialects are essentially one in their fundamental features. Of all European tonguesthe Lithuanian comes nearest to Sanskrit, still retaining many words lessremoved from the primitive Aryan than the corresponding Slavonic, Latin, orGerman terms. A good Lithuanian grammar has been compiled by Schleicher,but the literature is poor. When the Lithuanian power was at its heightthere were no writers in the national speech, and the clergy persecuted thebards, or burtiniias, who recited the traditional songs. A chronicler of the sixteenthcentury speaks of epic poems, but none have been recovered, and theonly poem of any length is that of the " Seasons," composed by a certain Donaleitisin the eighteenth century.vol. v. TThere are, however, numerous songs, fables, idyls, all