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The warm discussion which ensued, passed, like several others similar, which it is necessary to record, at Napoleon's quarters, near the spot where he was employed; and as there was truth on both sides; as, in these conversations, the opposite allegations contended without destroying each other; and as the first and last causes of the coolness of the Lithuanians were therein revealed, it is impossible to omit them.
First, then, trees or tree-spirits are believed to give rain and sunshine. When the missionary Jerome of Prague was persuading the heathen Lithuanians to fell their sacred groves, a multitude of women besought the Prince of Lithuania to stop him, saying that with the woods he was destroying the house of god from which they had been wont to get rain and sunshine.
It is hard to conceive that Poland was at one time perhaps the most powerful kingdom of Europe, with a population numbering twenty millions and extending from the Baltic to the Carpathians and the Black Sea, including in its territory the basins of the Warta, Vistula, Dwina, Dnieper and Upper Dniester, and that it had under its dominion besides Poles proper and the Baltic Slavs, the Lithuanians, the White Russians and the Little Russians or Ruthenians.
The moment has come when all deceptions have ceased. Brandenburgians, Prussians, Silesians, Pomeranians, Lithuanians! you know what you have suffered for seven years past; you know what your fate would be if we should not succeed in the struggle about to begin.
So far as the Celts and Lithuanians are concerned, this conclusion will perhaps hardly be contested. But both for them and for the Germans it is confirmed by a remarkable piece of religious conservatism.
That they were probably not so called till they came into the land of the Getae, about the mouths of the Danube. That on reaching the land of the Getae they took their name; 'just as the Kentings of Anglo-Saxon England took name from the Keltic country of Kent; and that the names Goth, Gothones, Gothini were originally given to Lithuanians by their Sclavonic neighbours.
Third group, the other sanitars, the strangest collection of faces, wild, savage and eastern: Tartars, Lithuanians, Mongolian, mild and northern, cold and western, merry and human from Little Russia, gigantic and fierce from the Caucasus, small and frozen from Archangel, one or two civilised and superior and uninteresting from Petrograd and Moscow.
The Russian Empire, sown by Vikings, Slavs, and Mongols, has a rich racial flora, including Germans, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Letts, Roumanians, Afghans, Tartars, Finns, and scores of others.
And it is also well known among the old Lithuanians—but this knowledge they probably derived from the rabbins—that the huge, long Dragon of the zodiac, which winds its starry coils over the sky, and which astronomers erroneously christen a serpent, is not a serpent, but a fish, and is named Leviathan.
Both propositions were strenuously contested by Rogers. In regard to the second point in particular, he showed triumphantly, by citations from the "Polonians, Prussians, and Lithuanians," that commissions ought to be previously exhibited.
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