stock. These newcomers are supposed to have driven the aborigines, who are believed to have been of Ugrian descent, northwards, where a remnant still exists, and are known as Lapps. These were, however, in ancient time also called Fins, and the name Finmark as the boundary of their country has come down to our time. The Fins of the Baltic, the inhabitants of the present Finland, are, however, now a different race from the so-called Northern Finns or the Lapps, and although they have affinity in language,[1] they were known as distinct in the time of King Alfred.
The Fins of Finland are for the most part blonde, and a longer-headed race than the Slavs, like the long-headed Letts and Lithuanians, and, like them, are of mixed descent. They are apparently, from all the evidence available concerning them, an offshoot from the same trunk as the Teutons,[2] or at least of the Aryan stock.
The Fins, who called themselves Quains,[3] are the same people as the Cwæns, which was their native name mentioned by King Alfred. In his ‘Orosius’ Alfred mentions both Fins and Scride Fins or Lapps, and describes the locality of each race. After mentioning the country of the Swedes and the Esthonian arm of the sea, he says: ‘To the north over the waste is Cwénland, and to the north-west are the Scride Finns, and to the west the Northmen.’[4] In the Anglo-Saxon times some of the Cwæns or Fins occupied part of the Scandinavian peninsula as far south as Helsingland, on the east of Sweden, opposite to Finland, where the name Helsingfors probably denotes some ancient connection with Helsingland. As the Lapps were called Skidfinnen by the Norse, and are still called Fins by them, some confusion has arisen in the use of this
