The lapps are a small group of people, about 33,000 in all, widely scattered over an enormous territory in the northern part of the Fenno-Scandian peninsula. They come under the dominion of four countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. To most Lapps this fact has little significance: as a rule they learn to speak, in addition to their own language, the language of the country to which they belong, and they are naturally obliged to obey some at least of its laws. Yet they have remained true to their own oldfashioned way of life, their traditional customs and their picturesque dress. They possess also a keen sense of beauty, which is displayed in the decoration of their household goods and ornaments. It is not surprising that for many centuries they have attracted the interest of travellers and men of science. The contemplation of this people?the least European of Europeans?tending herds of reindeer in the vast forests and frozen wastes of the North, and living a simple nomadic life in tents, has appealed to the romantic emotions which lie in the breasts of even the more sophisticated of us. In spite of all this attention, little is known of the origin of the Lapps. The documentary evidence concerning their history is scarce and unreliable up to the seventeenth century, and the archaeological discoveries so far reported cannot tell us much about their prehistory. The language of the Lapps is interesting because it offers a clue to their past and present-day relatives; but deductions of this sort must be made of course only with great caution, since languages can easily be taken over and assimilated by certain peoples from others who are racially different. It should at once be made clear that the word race means to me, simply, a group of human beings who have in the course of time become differentiated sufHciently from other groups to be distinguishable from them by objective criteria. No invidious implication of the racial superiority of any one group is intended. Lapp is not an isolated tongue like that spoken by the Basques, for instance. It is a Finno-Ugrian language, most like Finnish but similar also to the Samoyed languages which are spoken along the Arctic coast of European Russia and in Western Siberia. Unfortunately, the philologists cannot agree on the relationship of these tongues, and I shall mention only two of the schools of thought. Some assume that about two thousand years ago the Lapps adopted the language of the proto-Finns; others have suggested the exact opposite, that the common ancestors of the Finns and the central Uralic peoples of Russia (Mordvins, Cheremiss, Permians) at some remote period in the past changed their vernacular?perhaps an Indo-European tongue?for the Finno-Ugrian language of the forefathers of the Lapps. If the latter theory be true, then the Lapps, together with the Ugrians (Magyars of Hungary and the small groups of Voguls and Ostyaks near the Gulf of Ob in North Russia) and the Samoyeds must be the descendants of the people who spoke the common Uralic parent language.