d, or absorbed the former inhabitants, and how the expulsion,
extermination, or absorption was effected. Now of these three processes,
absorption may have been more frequent than is commonly supposed, and it
seemed to me that in Northern Russia this process might be conveniently
studied. A thousand years ago the whole of Northern Russia was peopled
by Finnish pagan tribes, and at the present day the greater part of it
is occupied by peasants who speak the language of Moscow, profess the
Orthodox faith, present in their physiognomy no striking peculiarities,
and appear to the superficial observer pure Russians. And we have
no reason to suppose that the former inhabitants were expelled or
exterminated, or that they gradually died out from contact with the
civilisation and vices of a higher race. History records no
wholesale Finnish migrations like that of the Kalmyks, and no war of
extermination; and statistics prove that among the remnants of those
primitive races the population increases as rapidly as among the Russian
peasantry.* From these facts I concluded that the Finnish aborigines had
been simply absorbed, or rather, were being absorbed, by the Slavonic
intruders.

* This latter statement is made on the authority of Popoff
("Zyryanye i zyryanski krai," Moscow, 1874) and
Tcheremshanski ("Opisanie Orenburgskoi Gubernii," Ufa,
1859).

This conclusion has since been confirmed by observation. During my
wanderings in these northern provinces I have found villages in every
stage of Russification. In one, everything seemed thoroughly Finnish:
the inhabitants had a reddish-olive skin, very high cheek-bones,
obliquely set eyes, and a peculiar costume; none of the women, and very
few of the men, could understand Russian, and any Russian who visited
the place was regarded as a foreigner. In a second, there were already
some Russian inhabitants; the others had lost something of their pure
Finnish type, many of the men had discarded the old costume and spoke
Russian fluently, and a Russian visitor was no longer shunned. In a
third, the Finnish type was still further weakened: all the men spoke
Russian, and nearly all the women understood it; the old male costume
had entirely disappeared, and the old female costume was rapidly
following it; while intermarriage with the Russian population was no
longer rare. In a fourth, intermarriage had almost completely done its
work, and the old Finnish element could be