The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

2S2RUSSIA IN EUROPE.and beyond it to the Bosphorus. During the incessant wars between theTatars and Cossacks these shores were the scene of many a hard-fought battle,dyeing the sands and waters with blood.The Upper Dnieper axd the Pripet Basin.(White Russia, Polesya, Volhyxia.)Nearly all the region in which are collected the farthest head-streams of theDnieper is now inhabited by "White Russians, descendants of the old Krivichi ofFig. 140.The Liman of Tiligul.Scale 1 : 500,000.tofCSmolensk, and of the Dregovichi of the " quaking mosses." They occupy most ofthe land between the Soj on the east, and the Pripet on the south-west, as wellas the water-partings in the north and west, with the upper valleys of the Klemenand Dvina, forming a total area of about 106,000 square miles, but with a populationof no more than 3,600,000.The epithet of " White," applied also to the Muscovite Russians in the senseof " free," at the time when they were rescued from the Tatar yoke, has been thespecial designation of the Russians of the Upper Dnieper only since the end ofthe fourteenth century. At first applied by the Poles to all the Lithuanian