Walker Lake bulletin. (Hawthorne, Nev.) 1883-1926, 1895-02-13
OLD TEUTONS.
Very Few Germans are Descend
ed From Them.
SOME chronological THEORIES.
The South Germans Descendants of the
Ancient Ligupians, and Allied
to the Lapps.
ONE chronological THEORIES.

1t is safe assertion that not one
twentieth of the people born in Ger
many and who come to this country
hailing from there are of German race.
The Prussians, for instance, are no
more Germans than they are Turks;
they are solid mass of Sclavs, over
whom the Teutonic element is a mere
veneer, not contributing one hair of
their heads in fifty. 1t is true they
speak Deutsch, but that is mere acci-
dent and the result of conquest, just as
the Irish speak English, while racially
they are distinct people, and yet
Prussia stands before the world as the
typically German State; it was she
who championed the cause of fedora
tion, and is to-day the bulwark Of the
Fatherland against both France and
Russia. So says the Philadelphia
"Times.
AS late as the ninth century, when
people spoke of Germany they meant
only the country west Of Hamburg. and
all that is now central. Germany was
then barbarous region, peopled by
pagans and savages, alien in race and
language, and counted entirely without
the pale of civilization. Even the
oonquering arms of Charlemagne, the
hero of Spanish and italian wars,
were stayed at the Elbe by the bare
breasted valor of the natives, and the
river which now divides Germany in
che middle then eparated the empire
from the hostile Sclavs, Deutchsland
from Wendland.
When the great Otto filled the i'm
perial throne, however, the Margrave
Gero was commissioned to reduce to
subsection all the Sclavio races of GEN.
tral Germany. He was an able war
rior and the conquest was effectual.
In time the natives became completely
denationalized, adopted the language
of their rulers and became thoroughly
German in everything except race.
The people of Prussia remain to-day
totally different in type from their
compatriots of the west and south.
1t is curious, too, how these Sclayic
Prussians have forgotten their ancestry,
and piously believe themselves one
with their conquerors; but here and
there in secluded districts their native
tongues still linger, which their more
Teutonized brethren look upon as bar
barous idioms Wendish and Lusatian
still persist in Saxony, and Sorbish has
even risen to literary distinctions.
In eastern Prussia, too, the people
are Sclavic. They were not even
brought within the German body until
the thirteenth century, and the very
name of Prussia, now SO common in
politics, was originally that OF the
Sclavonic tribe most notable in the
region. Strange as it seems, these
very conquered Prussians, these latest
comers into the Teutonic brotherhood
and Germans only by adoption. are
they who struck the hardest blows for
German unity. In the country about
Dantzic nearly half million people
still speak their ancestral Kashoubish
dialect, but it is rapidly disappearing
before the encroachments of German,
and the last link which binds them to
their past will soon have passed away.
leaving no trace of their alien descent.
But the Prussians, both eastern and
western, are racially identical with
Poles and Russians, and they who
WELD the balance Of power in the en-
pire to-day are precisely of the same
kindred with those who rule in Mos
cow and st. Petersburg.
When the ancients speak of Ger
mans, they describe men of tall stature,
fair in hair and complexion and with
blue eyes, such as the tourist meets in
the northwest to-day; but the least OBJ
servant of travellers, will note on enter
ing the Southern States that he has
passed into country of short men, whose
are sallow. and whose hair
and eyes are dark. They manifestly
cannot be identical with the blonde
Germans; who are they?
In prehistoric times, central France
and southern Germany was peopled by
q race which scientists have agreed to
call the Ligurian. The Ligurians
never had history, as from time i'm
memorial they were conquered people
and always reckoned by writers among
their masters, subject to Gaul or Teu-
ton, Roman or German, but in all ages
the basis of the population.
They had yellow skins originally, like
the Mongolians, but steady infusion
Of white blood through many centuries
has frightened their compilations,
without, however, affecting the charac-
of their hair and eyes, and
they remain to-day a race isolated in
their peculiarities.
They are very ancient people, and
their antiquities fall quite as much to
the domain of the geologist as to the
historian; once they ranged over half
the continent, but ON the advent of the
white man they were. broken up and
scattered to the winds, and in far-away
frozen Lapland, among the icebergs
Of the Arctic seas, remnant still lives