fell to Brandenburg, with the exception of that part which Sweden usurped at the peace of Westphalia.  The island of Ruegen, which till A.D. 1478 had its own native princes, belonged to this latter.  It is the principal seat of German-Slavic antiquities.  The ancient Rugians and their gods are mentioned by Tacitus, and described by Saxo Grammaticus.  The old chronicles and legends, founded on still older traditions, speak of a large and flourishing city named Vineta on the small island Wollin, south-east of Ruegen, once the principal seat of the western Slavic commerce, and, as Herder calls it, the Slavic Amsterdam.  This city is said by some to have been destroyed by the Danes; by others to have been ingulfed in the sea by the sinking of the ground beneath it.  Modern inquirers, however, have doubted whether it ever existed; and, hard as it is to renounce the many poetical associations attached to such a subject,—­so similar to those which fill the mind in thinking of Pompeii and Herculaneum,—­their objections have not yet been satisfactorily refuted.

The third separate branch of the Vendish stem were the Ukrians, or Border-Vendes, Germ. Ukern, from Ukraina, border.  They lived in the territory which afterwards became the margravate of Brandenburg, and were divided into several tribes, as the Hevelli on the banks of the Havel, the Retarians, etc.  Their situation was such, that constant conflicts between them and the guardians or watch of the German frontiers, the Saxon margraves on the other side of the Elbe, were unavoidable.  These served gradually to extend the German marches or frontiers further and further, until in the year 1134 Albert the Bear, count of Ascania, finally conquered the Vendes.  The Slavic inhabitants of this region were cruelly and completely destroyed; the country was repeopled by German and Dutch colonists, and given as a fief by the emperor to Albert the Bear, the first margrave of Brandenburg.  Brandenburg was the German form for Brannibor, the most considerable of the Vendish cities, after which the country was called.  The names of places, many of them altered in a similar manner, are indeed the only weak traces of the Vendish language once spoken in this part of Germany.  No tribe of the Vendes seems to have been so completely extinguished; the present inhabitants of Brandenburg being of as pure a German origin, as those of any other part of Germany.

The descendants of only two Vendish tribes have preserved their language; and even these, from powerful nations spread over the surface of at least 4800 geographical square miles, have shrunk into the comparatively small number of scarcely two hundred thousand individuals, now inhabitants of Upper and Lower Lusatia.  Nearly all of them are peasants; for the higher classes, even if Slavic blood perhaps runs in their veins, are completely Germanized.  These tribes are the Sorabians, Lat. Sorabae, Germ. Sorben,