To balance this there is a Russian step to be referred to. On September 2nd the _Telegraph's_ correspondent in the Russian capital announced that St. Petersburg was no more. An Imperial decree made it known that in future the Russian capital was to be called Petrograd. The change was in the air for some time. The German-sounding name of the city had long been a strange anomaly, and with the outbreak of war there was a widespread demand that it should be altered. Among the Slav alternatives proposed were Petrogorod, Petrovsk, Petroff, and Sviato Petrovsk. The appellation actually selected is by no means novel in its use. There was a time when old-fashioned people pretty generally spoke of Petrograd, and not of Petersburg. The name now officially adopted for the capital is also applied to it in the works of Pushkin, Lermontoff, Alexei, Tolstoi, and Nekrasoff. Dr. Dillon, commenting on the telegram, added: What's in a name? The Russians hold that there is a good deal in it, else they would not have chosen the present moment to reconsider a proposal made many times during the past thirty-five years to change that of their capital on the Neva. The city heretofore known as St. Petersburg is in future to be called Petrograd. This apparent innovation is in reality a return to the old name which Peter the Great's second capital had borne from the beginning. All the old books published in that city during the latter part of Peter's reign and those of his immediate successors bear the word Petrograd on the title-pages. Grad and Gorod are two forms of the same word which means city or town. Etymologically it connotes an enclosed space, and belongs to the same root as the English word garden. It occurs in hundreds of Slav geographical names, as, for instance, in Novgorod--"new town"--Ivangorod, Elizabetgrad, Euxinograd. Constantinople itself is often called in Russian the "Emperor's city," Tsaregrad. During the reigns of the Empresses Catherine, Anna, and Elizabeth the mania for adopting foreign names was rife in Russia, and on many places known in old Russian history German names were bestowed, most of which remain to this day.