To the eye of the archæologist, all this hardship has secured one compensating advantage. It has left the Wends--in dress, in customs, in habits of mind, in songs and traditions--most interestingly primitive. Everything specifically Wendish bears the unmistakable stamp of national childhood, early thought, old-world life. There has been no development within the race, as among other Slavs. There have been modern overlayings, no doubt; but they are all foreign additions. The Wendish kernel has remained untouched, displaying with remarkable distinctness that peculiarly characteristic feature which runs through all the Slav kindred, at once uniting and separating various tribes, combining a curious unity of substructure with a striking variety of surface. Among the "Serbs," or--"Sorbs"--really "Srbs"--of Germany, occur names which reveal a close kinship with Russians, Bohemians, and Croats. By the strange survival--among two tribes alone in all the world--of a complete dual, and the retention of a distinct preterite tense (without the use of an auxiliary verb) their language links them plainly with the Old Bulgarians. Their national melodies exhibit a marked resemblance to those melancholy airs which charm English visitors in Russia. Yet a Pole, one of their nearest neighbours, is totally at sea among the Wends. His language is to them almost as unintelligible as that of their "dumb" neighbours on the opposite side, the _Njemski_--that is, the Germans. Even among themselves the Lusatians are divided in speech. In Lower Lusatia, for instance, where the population are descended from the ancient Lusitschani, if you want to ask a girl for a kiss, you must say: _gulitza, daj mi murki_. In Upper Lusatia, where dwell the Miltschani, the same request takes the shape of: _holitza, daj mi hupkuh_. My German friends would have it that to their ears Wendish sounded very like English--which simply meant, that they understood neither the one nor the other. In truth, there is no resemblance whatever between the two tongues, except it be this, that like some of our own people, the Wends are incorrigibly given to putting their H's in the wrong place. The explanation, in respect of the Wends, is, that in their language no word is known to begin with a vowel. Hence, to make German at all pronounceable to their lips, they often have to add an H as initial letter, the impropriety of which addition they happen generally to remember at the wrong time. It will terrify linguists among ourselves to be told that this Slav language--which the Germans despise as barbarous, which has scarcely any literature, and which is spoken by very few men of high education--possesses, in addition to our ordinary verbs, also verbs "neutropassive," "inchoative," "durative," "momentaneous," and "iterative"; an aorist, like Greek, and a preterite aorist of its own; a subjunctive pluperfect, and in declension seven cases, including a