dries rapidly and is thereupon reduced to a fine dust; but it absorbs moisture with equal promptitude, and after a rain takes on the appearance of a coalblack paste. The formation of this wonderfully fertile layer is attributed to the slow decomposition of the steppe grasses, accumulated during many cen

turies.

The tchernoziom circles like a belt across European Russia, from Podolia and Kiev on the southwest beyond Kazan in the northeast; after the interruption of the Ural ridge it reappears in Siberia in the southern part of Tobolsk. The trees disappear altogether as we advance southwards, till not even a bush is to be seen. Nothing is visible to the eye but hundreds of miles of fertile black soil, a limitless field stretching beyond the horizon. As a consequence of its fertility this portion of Russia is most populous; the population increases steadily, as railways are constructed and as agriculture gains upon the surrounding steppes.

Between the Black Lands and the southern seas lie the steppes proper wherein the dead level of the country, the absence of all arboreal vegetation, and the summer droughts attain their maximum. These great plains, covering over half a million miles of Europe, include many different qualities of soil, destined to as many different ends.

The sandy, stony, saline steppes will forever be unfit for cultivation. The fertile steppes which occupy the greater part of the space between the Black Lands and the Black Sea and the sea of Azov consist of a layer of black vegetable mould ready for cultivation and teeming with fertility. The grass, growing five or six feet high, in rainy seasons even higher, accounts in some measure for the absence of woods: its rapid luxuriant growth would smother young trees.

The virgin steppe with its rank vegetation -the steppe of history and poetry diminishes day by day, and will soon disappear before the agricultural invasion. The legendary Ukraine has almost lost its wild beauty; Gogol's steppe, like Cooper's prairie, will soon be but a memory lost in the black belt. The long delay in opening up these grassy plains is due as well to the lack of water and wood as to the lack of workers. The lack of water is difficult to remedy, hence the plains are bound to experience alternately good and bad years; hence, also, the frequent famines in lands which otherwise might be regarded as the storehouse of the empire.

Perhaps an even greater drawback is the lack of trees; thereby the population is deprived both of fuel and of materials for building. Stalks of the tall steppe-grasses and the dung of the flocks, which otherwise would go to the soil, supply it with a fuel that would not suffice for a dense population. The introduction of railroads and the opening of coal mines will, however, remedy little by little these evils, by supplying fuel and restoring the manure to the soil. The proximity to the estuaries of the great rivers and to the Black Sea renders the position of these steppes especially favourable to trade with Europe.

The Ural-Caspian depression is as truly a desert as the Sahara. It contains but few oases. These saline steppes sink in part below the sea level, like the Caspian itself, whose ancient basin they formed, and which now, narrowed and sunk, lies about eighty-five feet below the Black Sea's surface. This region is of all European Russia the barest, the driest, and the most exposed to extreme seasons. It is decidedly Asiatic in soil, climate, flora, fauna, and inhabitants. This barren steppeland, covering three hundred thousand square miles, has less than a million and a half inhabitants. It is good for nothing but pasturage; and is therefore overrun with nomad Asiatic tribes.

We cannot consider as Russian in character the Caucasus and the southern coast of the Crimea; these present an entirely different aspect, and are as varied as the real Russia is monotonous. In the valleys of the Caucasus appear again forests absent from the centre of the empire southwards dense and vigorous, not thin and scattered and monotonous as in the north. Here fruit-trees thrive, and all varieties of plant life for which Russia seeks in vain over her wide plains, from the shores of the ice-bound north to the Black Sea the vine, which on the banks of the Don finds but a precarious existence; the mulberry-tree; the olive. Few are the fruits that cannot prosper in the hanging gardens of the Crimea suspended above the sea, or in Trans

caucasia where, not content with having introduced successfully the cultivation of cotton and the sugar cane, the Russian merchants are anxious to establish tea plantations.

DIVERSITY OF RACES

The number of diverse races is accounted for by the configuration of Russia. Lacking defined boundaries to east and west, Russia has been open always to invasion- she has been the great highway of emigration from Asia into Europe. The strata of human alluvions have nowhere been more numerous, more mingled, more broken or inharmonious than on this flat bed, where each wave, pushed by the one behind it, encountered no obstacle other than the wave which had preceded. Even since historical times it is difficult to enumerate the peoples who have followed one another upon Russian soilwho have there formed empires more or less durable: Scythian, Sarmatian, Goth, Avar, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Chazar, Petcheneg, Lithuanian, Mongol, Tatar; without counting the previous migrations of the Celts and Teutones, or of peoples whose very names have perished, but among whom even the most obscure have left upon the population some impression whose origin to-day it is impossible to trace.

While the configuration of Russia has left her open to every invader, the structure of her soil forbade the development of the invaders into organised nations independent of one another. Instead of being the consequence of slow development by physical causes, this multiplicity of races and tribes is an historical heritage. Without considering the glacial regions of the north, uninhabitable save for hunters and fishers, or the sandy and saline steppes of the southeast, where wander only pastoral nomads, this complexity of races and tribes, far from being a result of adaptation to the soil - far from being in harmony with physical conditions, is directly opposed to them. Far from having a tendency to race diversion, the natural conditions made for unity and harmony. The absence of boundaries made it impossible for the different tribes to isolate themselves.

In the immense quadrilateral comprised between the glacial ocean and the Black Sea, between the Baltic and the Ural, there is not a single mountain not a single dividing line. Over this even surface the different tribes have been obliged to scatter at random-just as the waters have flowed together, having no ridge to separate them, no banks to contain them. Thus, while custom, religion, and language prevented their mingling, they were yet obliged to live side by side: to invade one another, to mingle one with another without loss of individuality, as the rivers which flow together without confounding their waters. Exhausted in the effort to spread over too large expanses, or broken up into fragments, all these races have the more easily submitted to the domination of one rule; and under this domination they have been the more rapidly unified and mingled. From this fusion, begun

centuries ago under the Christian empire and the Muscovite sovereignty, have sprung the Russian people-that mass of about 129,000,000 souls, which, compared with other peoples, resembles the sea devouring its own shores, a sea dotted with islands which it swallows one by one.

Out of the seeming chaos of Russian ethnology emerge definitely three principal elements - Finn, Tatar, and Slav, which last has to-day to a great extent absorbed the other two. Not counting the three millions of Jews. in the west, the seven or eight hundred thousand Rumanians in Bessarabia, the eight or nine hundred thousand Germans of the Baltic provinces and the southern colonies; without counting the Kalmucks of the steppe of the lower Volga, the Circassians, the Armenians, the Georgians, and the whole babel of the Caucasus-all the races and tribes which have invaded Russia in the past and all which inhabit her to-day can be traced to one of these three races. As far back as history goes, are to be found upon Russian soil, under one name or another, representatives of all these three groups; and their fusion is not yet so complete that we cannot trace their origin, their distinctive characteristics, or their respective original dominions.

The Finnish tribe seems in olden times to have occupied the most extensive territory in what is to-day called Russia. It is manifestly foreign to Aryan or European stock, whence, with the Celts and Latins, Germans and Slavs, most of the European peoples have sprung. Ethnological classifications usually place the Finns in a more or less comprehensive group known variously as Turanian, Mongolian, and Mongoloid.

The Mongols, properly so called, with the Tatars are usually arranged beside the Finns in the Ural-Altaic group; which, on the other hand, rejects the Chinese and other great nations of oriental Asia. This classification appears to be the most reasonable; but it must be noticed that this UralAltaic group is far from presenting the same homogeneousness as the Aryan or Semitic group. The relationship between the numerous branches is far less fundamental than between Latin and German; it is probably far more remote than that between the Brahman or Gheber of India and the Celt of Scotland or Brittany; at bottom it is perhaps less close than between the Indo-European and the Semite.

The Finns

The Finnish race, which outside of Hungary is almost entirely comprised within European Russia, numbers five or six millions, divided into a dozen different tribes. To the Hungarian family in the north belongs the only Finnish people which ever played an important rôle in Europe, or arrived at a high state of civilisation - the Magyars of Hungary. In

the northwest we find the Finns properly so called; they are subdivided into two or three tribes, the Suomi, as they designate themselves, constituting the only tribe in the whole empire that possesses a national spirit, a love of country, a history, and a literature; also the only one that has escaped the slow absorption by which their kindred have been swallowed up. They form five-sixths of the population of the grand duchy of Finland - a population almost wholly rural. A Swedish element mingled with German and Russian is predominant in the cities.

St. Petersburg is, truth to tell, built in the midst of Finnish territory; the immediate surroundings only are russified, and that quite recently:

A TATAR

(Russian)

even half a century ago Russian was not understood in the hamlets lying at the very gates of the capital. To this Finnish branch belong the Livs, a tribe nearly extinct, which has given its name at Livonia; also the Lapps- the last, physically the ugliest, morally the least developed, of all the branches of this tribe.

The race is almost infinitely subdivided; its members profess all the religions from Shamanism to Mohammedanism, from Greek orthodoxy to Lutheranism. They are nomadic, like the Lapp; pastoral, like the Bashkir; sedentary and agricultural like the Esth and the Finn. They have adopted the customs and spoken the language of each and all, have been ruled by peoples of different origins, have been russified after having been partially tatarised all these influences contributing to break up the race into insignificant fragments. As numerous as their Hungarian kindred, the Finns of the Russian Empire are far from being able to claim an equal political significance.

Is it true that the alliance with the Finns is for Russia an irremediable cause of inferiority? It is doubtful. In their isolation and disruption, hampered by the thankless soil upon which they dwell, the Finns have been unable to achieve an original development; as compensation, they have everywhere manifested a singular facility of assimilation with more developed races with which they have come in contact; they allowed themselves easily to be overwhelmed by a civilisation which they themselves were unable to originate: if they possessed no blood-ties with Europe, they placed no obstacles in the way of annexation by her. Their religion is the best proof. The majority have long been Christians; and it is principally Christianity which has led the way to their fusion with the Slavs and their assimilation into civilised Europe. From Hungary to the Baltic and the Volga, they have accepted with docility the three principal historical forms of Christianity; the most modern, Protestantism, has thriven better among the Finnish and Esthonic tribes than among the Celtic, Iberian, and Latin peoples.

If we seek in language an unmistakable sign of race and intelligence, it must be admitted that certain Finns - the Suomi of Finland like the Magyars of Hungary have brought their agglutinated languages to a perfection which for power, harmony, and wealth of expression well bears comparison with our most complex flexional languages. If it is true that the Finns are related to the Mongols, they have certainly the virtues of that race, which holds its own so well in its struggle with Europe: they possess the same stability, patience, and perseverance; hence perhaps the fact that to every country and every state which has felt their influence the Finns have communicated a singular power of resistance, a remarkable vitality.

ETHNOLOGICAL DISTRIBUTION OF RELIGIONS

The Finn has become Christian; the Turk or Tatar, Moslem; the Mongol, Buddhist: to this ethnological distribution of religion there are few exceptions. Hereto are attributable the causes of the widely different destinies of these three groups-particularly the neighbouring Finns and Tatars. It is religion which has prepared the one for its European existence; it is religion which has made that existence impossible for the other. Islam has given the Tatar a higher and more precocious civilisation; it has inspired him to build flourishing cities like the ancient Sarai and Kazan, and to found powerful states in Europe and Asia; it has achieved for him a brilliant past, while exposing him to a future full of difficulties: while saving him from absorption into Europe, it has left him completely outside the gate of modern civilisation.

It is the Tatars who have given to the Russians the name of Mongols, to which the Tatars themselves have but a questionable right. In any case the title is not applicable to the true Russians, who have at most but a drop or two of Mongol blood in their veins, and less of Tatar than the Spaniards have of Moorish or Arab.

At the same time with the process of absorption and assimilation of the Finnish element, another process has for centuries been going on- an inverse process of secretion and elimination of the Tatar and Moslem elements which Russia found herself unable to assimilate. After their submission a great number of Tatars left Russia, being unwilling to become the subjects of the infidels whose masters they had been. Before the progress of Christianity they spontaneously retreated to the lands still dominated by the law of the prophet. After the destruction of the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, they tended to concentrate in the Crimea and the neighbouring straits in what up to the eighteenth century was known as Little Tartary; after the conquest of the Crimea by Catherine II they took their way still farther toward the empire of their Turkish brethren. Even in our own time, after the war of Sebastopol and after the conquest of the Caucasus, the emigration of the Tatars and the Nogaians began again on an enormous scale, together with that of the Circassians. In the Crimea the Tatar population, already diminished by one-half in the time of Catherine II, is today scarcely one-fifth of what it was at the time of the annexation to Russia. The introduction of obligatory military service in the year 1874 drove them out in large numbers. By defeat and voluntary exile have the Tatars been reduced to insignificant groups in a country where, formerly, they reigned for centuries-in some parts of which even they were the sole inhabitants,b