numine.  In the year 1828, he travelled as far as Kajan, collecting poems and songs of the Finnish people, sitting by the fireside of the aged, rowing on the lakes with the fishermen, and following the flocks with the shepherds.  In 1829 he published at Helsingfors a work under the following title:  Kantele taikka Suomee Kansan sek vazhoja etta nykysempia Runoja ja Lauluja (Lyre, or Old and New Songs and Lays of the Finnish Nation).  In another work edited in 1832, written in Swedish, entitled:  Om Finnarues Magiska Medicin (On the Magic Medicine of the Finns), he dwells on the incantations so frequent in Finnish poetry, notably in the Kalevala.  A few years later he travelled in the province of Archangel, and so ingratiated himself into the hearts of the simple-minded people that they most willingly aided him in collecting these songs.  These journeys were made through wild fens, forests, marshes, and ice-plains, on horseback, in sledges drawn by the reindeer, in canoes, or in some other forms of primitive conveyance.  The enthusiastic physician described his journeyings and difficulties faithfully in a paper published at Helsingfors in Swedish in 1834.  He had the peculiar good luck to meet an old peasant, one of the oldest of the runolainen in the Russian province of Wuokiniem, who was by far the most renowned minstrel of the country, and with whose closely impending death, numerous very precious runes would have been irrevocably lost.

The happy result of his travels throughout Finland, Dr. Lonnrot now commenced to arrange under the central idea of a great epic, called Kalevala, and in February, 1835, the manuscript was transmitted to the Finnish Literary Society, which had it published in two parts.  Lonnrot, however, did not stop here; he went on searching and collecting, and, in 1840, had brought together more than one thousand fragments of epical poetry, national ballads, and proverbs.  These he published in two works, respectively entitled, Kanteletar (Lyre-charm), and The Proverbs of the Suomi People, the latter containing over 1700 proverbs, adages, gnomic sentences, and songs.

His example was followed by many of his enthusiastic countrymen, the more prominent of whom are Castren, Europaeus, Polen and Reniholm.  Through the collections of these scholars so many additional parts of the epical treasure of Finland were made public that a new edition of the Kalevala soon became an imperative necessity.  The task of sifting, arranging, and organizing the extensive material, was again allotted to Dr. Lonnrot, and in his second editions of the Kalevala, which appeared in 1849, the epic, embracing fifty runes and 22,793 lines, had reached its mature form.  The Kalevala was no sooner published than it attracted the attention of the leading scholars of Europe.  Men of such world-wide fame as Jacob Grimm, Steinthal, Uhland, Carrière and Max Müller hastened to acknowledge its