Hence, the way lay clearly indicated for the Ukrainians of the 19th and 20th Century. Ethnological investigations and the scientific study of folk-lore have been taken up very eagerly by Ukrainian scholars, so that in this particular field, recent Ukrainian science, perhaps, ranks highest in all Slavic science. In no other cultured nation of Europe is the life of the educated elements so permeated with the influences of the nation’s own popular culture. The Ukrainian cultural movement is hardly a century old, and yet it has results to show which, even today, guarantee the cultural independence of the Ukrainian nation. Active relations with Central and Western European cultures have been established, which may become of incalculable effect in the further development of Ukrainian culture. [211] [Contents] Relations Between the Soil and the People of Ukraine The geographical situation of the Ukraine is the same today as it was a thousand years ago. If the theories which call the present Ukrainian territory the original home of the Aryans are true, the Ukrainians must be considered the primeval autochthones. The limits of the Ukrainian nation, too, are almost the same today as they were a thousand years ago, altho, in the meantime, great shifts have taken place. Only in the west, the Ukrainians have lost a strip about 30 kilometers wide to the Poles, thru the Polonization movement, which has been advancing eastward since 1340. In this section the Ukrainian element has survived only in the mountains. The northern border, next to the White Russians, which, since primitive times, has consisted of great forests and swamps, has always remained without changes of any kind. On the other hand, the part of the northern border east of the Dnieper, and still more the eastern and southern borders, have been subject to radical changes in the course of Ukrainian history. The old Ukrainian state of Kiev rapidly developed a far-flung expansive movement, and soon covered almost all of Eastern Europe. In the south, the old Kingdom of Kiev, and together with it the southern tribes of East Slavs (the ancestors of the present Ukrainians) reached the delta of the Danube and the Black Sea and the foothills of the Caucasus, where, in the present Kuban district, the old [212]province and petty principality of Tmutorokan was situated. How far to the north the southern East Slavic tribes then extended we can not tell exactly. But it is very improbable that they extended beyond the woods and swamps of the Polissye.