The Swedes are a hardworking, industrious and intelligent race, not fully conscious of their own rich endowment and slow to push their individual claims. In moments of danger and distress, this people give evidence of an active heroism, which offers a great contrast to their usual quiet and peaceful demeanor. The Swedish nation is endowed with an unusual inventive power, which has placed it in the first rank of scientific research, having produced a quota of initiative spirits, as originators, founders and innovators of sciences, which is considerably larger than that of any other modern country, in proportion to the population. The national temperament is, like the soil, composed of extremes. With the serene quiet and almost sullen tranquillity goes a patience of extraordinary endurance which, when it gives in, surprises by the passion which takes its place. To the melancholy trait in the Swedish character is contrasted a great desire for the pleasures of life and exuberant animal spirits. Under a quiet surface, the Swede conceals a rapid comprehension and an almost morbid sensitiveness, sometimes causing people of other nationalities to judge him slow of intellect or perfidious, when he is only slow of action or indisposed to show his feelings. The most valuable inheritance from his ancestors is his moral courage, while the ancient Northern trait of self-restraint is often carried to an extreme. Akin to both is his dignity. He possesses great musical and improvisatorial gifts which complete his lyric-rhetorical temperament. There are some 6,000 Laplanders and some 20,000 Finns living in the furthest North, and foreigners to the number of about 20,000 dwell in Sweden, mostly Norwegians, Finns and Danes. More than 99 per cent of the population consists of native Swedes, and 99.9 per cent belong to the Lutheran state church or the Protestant denominations. The principal towns are Stockholm, the capital, with 300,000 inhabitants, enchantingly beautiful in situation, on the mainland and islands at the outlet of Lake Mælar into the Baltic; Gothenburg, with 120,000 inhabitants, the chief commercial centre, at the mouth of the Gotha River, by the North Sea; Malmœ, with 60,000 inhabitants, in Scania, by the Sound. The university towns of Upsala, in Upland, and Lund, in Scania, have 25,000 and 17,000 inhabitants, respectively. HISTORY OF SWEDEN CHAPTER I _Sweden in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times--Archæological Finds and Classical Testimony_ The Swedes, although the oldest and most unmixed race in Europe, realized very late the necessity of writing chronicles or reviews of historic events. Thus the names of heroes and kings of the remotest past are helplessly forgotten, and lost also the history of its earliest religion and institutions.