The domestic animals are the same as in central Europe. Only in the extreme south camels and buffaloes are added. The horned cattle belong chiefly to the so-called Ukrainian breed, distinguished by its gray color and its size, bony and strong-limbed. Hungarian cattle is widely distributed on the southwest borders. In recent years pure Dutch, Swiss and Tyrol breeds have been spread. The finest horses, the Ukrainian, have been raised by the Zaporog Cossacks and are noted for strength, speed and adaptability for all kinds of work. The Chor nomoric variety is raised by the Kuban Cos sacks and is prized throughout eastern Europe for its high qualities. Another breed, the Hut zulian mountain horse, possesses great strength though of small stature, and is unsurpassed for mountain roads. The peasant horses of Galicia, Podolia and Volhynia especially, despite their somewhat clumsy appearance, are particularly adapted for the rough roads of their land. Donkeys and mules are rare, and very few goats are kept. In sheep the Ukraine, thanks to vast pastures, is the richest country in Europe. Besides the native breeds, foreign merino sheep are raised, especially on the steppes. Hogs are raised in great numbers, the Polish, Russian and native varieties. In barn yard fowl the Ukraine is the richest land in eastern Europe. Much honey is also produced, besides mulberry leaves, though the silkworm industry is unimportant.
Ethnography.— The Ukrainians are a Slav race which diverged from the common stock at a very early period and developed during the centuries into an entirely independent Slav na tion, just as Poles, Czechs, Serbs and Bulgars have done. Of that great family the Ukrain ians form the second largest branch. Their nearest relations are the Ruthenes (q.v.), who are true Ukrainians who had long been incor porated in the Austrian Empire and lived under Hapsburg and Hungarian rule, but temporarily reunited with the mother-country as a result of the European War. The old Ukrainian Em pire of Kiev was as old as the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, but while the political evolution of the western European na tions was proceeding, the Ukrainians were hin dered by reason of their geographical situation at the western portals of Asia, where they were subject to Mongolian invasion. Though a mixed race, its formation took place in a dis tant prehistoricpast, while later admixtures were too insignificant to change the type ma terially. From the Vislok to the Kuban and from the Pripet to the Black Sea, the Ukrainian people constitute a uniform anthropological type, which has preserved itself in its purest state in one wide zone embracing the Ukrainian Carpathian lands, Pokutye, Podolia, the Dnieper Plateau and Plain, the Donetz Plateau and the Kuban sub-Caucasus country. Tall of stature, with long legs and broad shoulders, strongly tinted complexions, dark, thick, curly hair, rounded head and long face with a high and broad brow, dark eyes, straight nose, medium mouth and small ears, with strongly, developed lower face — these characteristics differentiate the Ukrainians from their neighbors, especially the White and Great Russians and the Poles.
They are among the tallest peoples of Europe; the finest physical types are those of the Kuban and sub-Caucasus, descended from the Zaporog Cossacks, who for centuries represented the flower of the people's strength. Under the old regime many of the Russian Ukrainians were enrolled in the guard regiments of the tsars. See SLAVS. ..
Language and Literature.— There had long been an impression that the Ukrainian language was a rural dialect of Polish, while Russian bureaucracy consistently encouraged the view that it was merely a Little Russian dialect of the Great Russian language. In recent times, however, the more scientific philologists have arrived at the conclusion that Ukrainian is not a dialect of Russian, but an independent lan guage of equal rank with Russian, related thereto just as Bulgarian or Serbian, Polish or Bo hemian. Two close analogies may be found in the Latin and Teutonic languages, e.g., Spanish and Rumanian are Latin languages, but are not Latin dialects; Flemish, Swedish and Dutch are Teutonic languages, but not German (I'dialects.lo When the first Duma in 1905 removed the re strictions on Little Russian publications which had been imposed in 1876, the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences emphatically declared that the two were independent languages of equal rank, as, for instance, English and French. To the Ukrainian, Russian is a foreign tongue and difficult to acquire. There are four dia lects of Ukrainian — the North and South Ukrainian, the Galician or Red Russian and the Carpathian Mountain dialect. These are again subdivided into idioms, of which the North con tains four, the South three, the Galician two and the Carpathian four, though all of them differ but little from each other. Despite many years of rigorous suppression, the Ukrainian language has been kept alive in all its richness, flexibility, euphony, comparative purity and wide range of expression.
Among Slavonic literatures only those of the Russians and Poles surpass the Ukrain ian, which possesses a large store of popular poetry, epic folklore and pre-Christian religious and secular songs. This literature has been built up during nearly a thousand years, dating from the flourishing days of the Kiev Empire and surviving through five centuries of unre mitting struggle against Tatar barbarism. Yet from those dark ages there remain legal, theo logical, philosophical, polemic and even dra matic monuments of literature composed in a jumbled macaronis language of mixed Church Slavonic and Ukrainian. The impetus for a revival of Ukrainian literature was given by Kotlarevsky in 1798 through introducing the pure popular speech in his writings. A large number of poets and prose writers rose to more than local fame during the 19th century, chief among them being Kobylanska, Ste fanyk, Vov chok, Shevchenko, Fedkovich, Franko, Kotsiubinsky and Vinnichenko. Science has also made considerable progress, as also have history, geography and philosophy, while two learned societies have been established at Lemberg and Kiev. The circulation of Ukrain ian literature was forbidden by former Rus sian governments in the territories under their rule.