ans were strongly prejudiced against the Vendish name,--the
nations of this race, especially those in the western part of the
German territories, being despised as subjugated tribes, and inferior
in general knowledge and information,--they gradually renounced their
national peculiarities. Towards the close of the seventeenth century,
when Hennings, German pastor at Wustrow, took great pains to collect
among them historical notices and a vocabulary of their language, he
found the youth already ignorant of the latter, and the old people
almost ashamed of knowing it, or at least afraid of being laughed at
by their children. They took his inquiries, and those of other
intelligent persons, in respect to their ancient language and
usages, as intended to ridicule them, and denied at first any
knowledge of those matters. We find, however, that preaching in the
Vendish language of this region was still continued for some time
later. Divine service was held in it for the last time at Wustrow, in
the year 1751. According to the vocabularies which Hennings and a few
others collected, their dialect, like that spoken in Lower Lusatia,
was nearly related to the Polish language; partaking however in some
peculiarities of the Bohemian, and not without some of its own.[1]

The second great Vendish tribe, the Wiltzi or Pomeranians (Germ.
_Wilzen_), also called Veletabae, were, as we said above, subjugated
in A.D. 782 by the Obotrites; and the country between the Oder and
the Vistula formed for more than a hundred and fifty years a part of
the great Vendish kingdom. They regained, however, even before the
final dissolution of this latter in A.D. 1026, the partial
independence of their own dukes; who attached themselves to Germany,
and afterwards, under the name of the dukes of Pomerania, became
princes of the empire. In the year 1124 the first Pomeranians were
baptized by Otho, bishop of Bamberg; and the place where this act was
performed, Ottosbrunnen (Otho's Well), which five hundred years ago
was encircled by four lime-trees, is still shown to the traveller. As
they received religion and instruction from Germany, the influence of
the German language can easily be accounted for. German colonists
aided in spreading it throughout the whole country. The last person
who understood the old Pomeranian language, is said to have died in
the year 1404. No trace of it remains, excepting only the names of
places and persons, the Slavic origin of wh