themselves,
they began to cultivate the earth, and to trade in the productions of
the country. There are also early traces of their fondness for music
and poetry; and some circumstances, of which we shall speak in the
sequel, seem to justify the supposition of a very early cultivation of
the language.

All the knowledge we have respecting the ancient history of the Slavic
race, as we have seen, is gathered from foreign authors; the earliest
of their own historians did not write before the second half of the
eleventh century.[6] At this time the Slavic nations were already in
possession, partly as masters, partly as servants, of the whole vast
extent of territory, which they now occupy; and if we assume that at
the present time about seventy or eighty millions speak the Slavic
language in its different dialects, we must calculate that at the
above mentioned period, and in the course of the next following
centuries, before the Slavic was by degrees supplanted in the
German-Slavic provinces by the German idiom, the number of those who
called that language their mother tongue was at least the fifth part
greater. Schloezer observes, that, with the exception of the Arabians,
no nation on the globe had extended themselves so far. In the South,
the Adriatic, the range of the Balkan, and the Euxine, are their
frontiers; the coasts of the Icy Ocean are their limits in the North;
their still greater extent in an Eastern and Western direction reaches
from Kamtschatka and the Russian islands of the Pacific, where many of
their vestiges are to be found among scattered tribes, as far as to
the Baltic and along the banks of the rivers Elbe, Muhr, and Raab,
again to the Adriatic. It is this immense extent, which adds greatly
to the difficulties of a general survey of the different relations and
connections of nations, broken up into so many parts. The _history of
the language_ is our object, not the history of the people; we
therefore give of statistic and political notices only so much, as
seems to be requisite for the illustration of our subject.

The earliest data for the history of the civilization of the Slavic
race, we find in their mythology; and here their oriental origin
again appears. The antithesis of a good and evil principle is met with
among most of their tribes; and as even at the present time in some
Slavic dialects every thing good, beautiful, praiseworthy, is to them
synonymous with the purity of the white colour, th