Note 28 — INTRODUCTION.

“Professor F. Anton von Schiefner was a distinguished scholar of most various attainments. His specialty, however, was Tibetan, and more particularly the investigation of Buddhist legends of Indian and Occidental origin, a collection of which in English will soon be published by Messrs. Trübner & Co. He had, moreover, devoted himself with rare perseverance and disinterestedness to the utilisation and publication of the labours of two scholars whose own restless activity would, without him, have been almost entirely lost to the scientific world—namely, those of the Finnic linguist, Alexander Castrèn, and of the Caucasian linguist, Baron von Uslar. One might—sit venia verbo—almost say that both men had found in Schiefner their Homer. He edited the labours of Castrèn almost wholly from the posthumous papers of that brave and modest man, who, from 1838 to 1849, explored, under the greatest privations, the inhospitable regions of Norway, Lapland, and Siberia, where the tribes of the Finnic race are seated. Castrèn’s Reiseerinnerungen and Reiseberichte, edited by Schiefner, present a vivid picture of the hardships Castrèn had to go through, and which finally caused his premature death, in 1852, at the age of thirty-nine. We have lying before us the twelve volumes of his Samoyedan and Tungusian Grammars and Vocabularies, as well as those of the languages of the Buryats, Koibals, Karagasses, Ostyaks, &c.; his ethnological lectures on the Altaic races, and those on Finnic mythology—all worked out by Schiefner’s deft hand, and edited by him from 1835 to 1861. In connection therewith Schiefner also made a German translation of the Finnic national epos Kalevala, and also one of the Hero-Sagas of the Minussin Tatars. Schiefner was more advantageously situated in working up the collections of the estimable Caucasian linguist, Major-General von Uslar (1816 to 1873), written in the Russian language, with whom, until the General’s death, he was always able to confer directly. While Schiefner’s own and entirely independent work on the Thush language (1856), by the accuracy with which a hitherto quite uncultivated and altogether strange department was opened to linguistic investigation, had obtained for the author general appreciation, the united efforts of both scholars have furnished surprising results as regards these highly peculiar languages of the Caucasian mountaineers—the Avares, Abchases, Tchetchenzes, Kasikumüks, Kurines—which by their extraordinary sounds, as well as by their most singular grammatical structure, produce so very strange an impression. The personal intercourse with soldiers of Caucasian origin, garrisoned at St. Petersburg, was herein of high importance to Schiefner. His amiable and open manner in personal intercourse, characteristic of the whole man, bore him excellent fruit in this case. Science, and especially the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, has by Schiefner’s death sustained a heavy, indeed a quite irreparable, loss.”28