acter from their earliest history to
the present day. Often in the runes of The Kalevala reference is made
to the "cleansing and healing virtues of the vapors of the heated
bathroom."

The skull of the Finn belongs to the brachycephalic (short-headed)
class of Retzius. Indeed the Finn-organization has generally been
regarded as Mongol, though Mongol of a modified type. His color is
swarthy, and his eyes are gray. He is not inhospitable, but not
over-easy of access; nor is he a friend of new fashions. Steady,
careful, laborious, he is valuable in the mine, valuable in the field,
valuable oil shipboard, and, withal, a brave soldier on land.

The Finns are a very ancient people. It is claimed, too, that they
began earlier than any other European nation to collect and preserve
their ancient folk-lore. Tacitus, writing in the very beginning of the
second century of the Christian era, mentions the Fenni, as he calls
them, in the 46th chapter of his De Moribus Germanoram. He says of
them: "The Finns are extremely wild, and live in abject poverty. They
have no arms, no horses, no dwellings; they live on herbs, they clothe
themselves in skins, and they sleep on the ground. Their only
resources are their arrows, which for the lack of iron are tipped with
bone." Strabo and the great geographer, Ptolemy, also mention this
curious people. There is evidence that at one time they were spread
over large portions of Europe and western Asia.

Perhaps it should be stated here that the copper, so often mentioned in
The Kalevala, when taken literally, was probably bronze, or "hardened
copper," the amount and quality of the alloy used being not now known.
The prehistoric races of Europe were acquainted with bronze implements.

It may be interesting to note in this connection that Canon Isaac
Taylor, and Professor Sayce have but very recently awakened great
interest in this question, in Europe especially, by the reading of
papers before the British Philological Association, in which they argue
in favor of the Finnic origin of the Aryans. For this new theory these
scholars present exceedingly strong evidence, and they conclude that
the time of the separation of the Aryan from the Finnic stock must have
been more than five thousand years ago.

The Finnish nation has one of the most sonorous and flexible of
languages. Of the cultivated tongues of Europe, the Magyar, or
Hungarian, bears the most positive signs of a deep-rooted