RASKOLNIKS. See RUSSIA, II.

RASLE, rel (RASLES, RAZE, RALLE), SEBASTIEN: French Jesuit missionary to the North American Indians; b. at D81e (180 m. s.e. of Paris) in 1658; d. at Norridgewock, Me., Aug. 12 (23, new style), 1724. He arrived in Quebec Oct 13, 1689, and after laboring in the Abenaki mission of St. Francis, near the Falls of the Chaudière, seven miles above Quebec, and in the Illinois country, among the Algonquins (1691 or 1692), he returned to the Abenakis (1693 or, 1694), and finally settled at Norridgewock on the Kennebec. There he built a chapel (1698), and acquired so much influence among the Abenakis, that he was popularly believed to have incited them to attack the Protestant settlers on the coast. A price was set upon his head. In 1705, 1722, and 1724 Norridgewock was attacked by the settlers, with the result that the first time the chapel was burnt; the second time the rebuilt chapel and Rasle's house were pillaged, and his papers carried off, among them a manuscript dictionary of Abenaki, now in Harvard College library, printed in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ed. with introduction and notes, John Pickering (Cambridge, 1833); and, the third time, he and seven Indians who had undertaken to defend him were killed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Consult the Memoir by C. Francis in J. Sparks, Library of American Biography, 25 vols., Boston, 1834-47; the massive Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, ed. R. G. Thwaites, 73 vols., Cleveland, O., 1896-1902; and literature under JESUITS; and INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA, MISSIONS TO.

RASMUSSEN, ras-mu'sen, CHRISTIAN VILHELM: Danish missionary to Greenland; b. in Skrodsbjäirg near Kjöge (28 m. s.w. of Copenhagen), Denmark, Nov. 25, 1846. He was educated at Herlufsholm (B.A., 1865) and Copenhagen (Candidate in Theology, 1872) ; was missionary in Jakobs havn in the northern part of Greenland (1873 1895), having charge for about fifteen years of the missionary work in the colony of Umanak and oversight of the work in Egedesminde. On his return to Denmark, he was appointed provost of Lynge and Uggelöse (1896); since 1904 he has been lector, giving instruction to the Greenlandic catechists; he also assists the bishops and the minister of state in matters pertaining to church and eduction in Greenland. Besides translating Balslev's Bible History (first Danish ed., 1844) into Greenlandic, he has written a valuable Greenlandic grammar, Gronlandsk Sprogläre (Copenhagen, 1888), and, with J. Kjer, has given philology its first Danish Greenlandic dictionary, Dansk-Grönlandsk Ordbog (1893). In the new Greenlandic Bible, the translation of the books from Joshua to Esther is his work.

JOHN 0. EVJEN.