Slavic branches, which touch each other on the banks of the Danube,
the _Slovaks_ and the _Slovenzi_, have retained in its purity their
original national name."--According to Schaffarik's later opinion, as
expressed in his _Antiquities_, the appellation Slavi, Slaveni, or
Slovenians, is derived from one of their seats, that is, the country
on the Upper Niemen, where the _Stloveni_ or _Sueveni_ of Ptolemy
lived. It is said to be called by the Finns _Sallo_ (like every
woodland); by the Lithuanians, _Sallawa, Slawa_; in old Prussian,
_Salava_; by the neighbouring Germans, _Schalauen_; in Latin,
_Scalavia_. But it seems a more natural conclusion, that _vice versa_
the name of the district was rather derived from Slavic settlers
living in the midst of a German, Russian, and Finnish population--For
the derivation from _slovo_, word, speech, the circumstance seems to
speak, that in most Slavic languages the appellation for a German (and
formerly for all foreigners) is _Njemetz_, i.e. one dumb, an impotent,
nameless, speechless person. What more natural, in a primitive stage
of culture, than to consider only those as speaking, who are
_understood_; and those who seem to utter unmeaning sounds, as dumb,
impotent beings?]

[Footnote 6: The earliest Slavic historian is the Russian monk Nestor,
born in the year 1056. See below, in the History of the _Old Slavic_
and of the _Russian_ languages. The reader will there see, that even
the authority and age of this writer has been in our days attacked by
the hypercritical spirit of the modern Russian Historical school.]

[Footnote 7: See Görres' _Mythengeschichte der Asiatischen Welt_,
Heidelb. 1810. Kayssarov's _Versuch einer Slavischen Mythologie_,
Götting. 1804. Dobrovsky's _Slavia_, new edit. by W. Hanka, Prague
1834, p. 263-275. Durich _Bibliotheca Slavica_, Buda 1795. J.