The Science of Minecraft The Real

Science Behind the Crafting Mining

Biomes and More 1st Edition James
Daley
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-science-of-minecraft-the-real-science-behind-the-
crafting-mining-biomes-and-more-1st-edition-james-daley/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Genesis of Science James Hannam

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-genesis-of-science-james-
hannam/

Environment The Science Behind the Stories 7th Edition

Jay Withgott

https://ebookmeta.com/product/environment-the-science-behind-the-
stories-7th-edition-jay-withgott/

The World Behind the World: - Consciousness, Free Will,

And The Limits Of Science Erik Hoel

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-world-behind-the-world-
consciousness-free-will-and-the-limits-of-science-erik-hoel/

Essential Environment: The Science Behind the Stories

6th Edition Jay Withgott

https://ebookmeta.com/product/essential-environment-the-science-
behind-the-stories-6th-edition-jay-withgott/
Essential Environment 6th Edition The Science Behind
the Stories Jay H Withgott

https://ebookmeta.com/product/essential-environment-6th-edition-
the-science-behind-the-stories-jay-h-withgott/

The Science of Star Trek The Scientific Facts Behind

the Voyages in Space and Time 1st Edition Mark Brake

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-science-of-star-trek-the-
scientific-facts-behind-the-voyages-in-space-and-time-1st-
edition-mark-brake/

Citizen Science in the Digital Age Rhetoric Science and

Public Engagement James Wynn

https://ebookmeta.com/product/citizen-science-in-the-digital-age-
rhetoric-science-and-public-engagement-james-wynn/

The Artisan Kitchen The Science Practice and

Possibilities 1st Edition James Strawbridge

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-artisan-kitchen-the-science-
practice-and-possibilities-1st-edition-james-strawbridge/

The Science of Science 1st Edition Wang

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-science-of-science-1st-edition-
wang/
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 The continuous policy of the Russian government to civilise by
means of the knout has on the one hand brought about the result
that not Russia but only a few Russians evolved intellectually and,
on the other, it has given a certain direction to the thought and
intellectual productions of these few. Even during the reign of Peter I
or Catherine II, when the spirit of civilisation began to move its
wings, independent thought has had to sustain a fierce struggle
against authority. In the most civilised countries of western Europe
ever and anon a cross-current of reaction traverses the stream of
intellectual evolution: narrow-minded zealots, hypocritical bigots,
false patriots, literary Gibeonites, gossiping old women arrayed in
the mantles of philosophers, do their best to put fetters on the
independent thought of man, to nip the free and natural intellectual
development in the very bud by forcing it under the iron grip of
tradition and authority. These reactionary tendencies of the lovers of
darkness are only exceptions, and will lead thought for a while into a
side channel, but cannot stop the triumphant march onwards. Not so
in Russia.
In the empire of the czar thought is almost a crime and every
means is employed to keep it within the boundaries prescribed by
the governing power. To overstep these boundaries, to develop itself
freely, and I might say naturally, is to declare war against authority, to
revolt. The history of evolution of thought in Russia is therefore
almost identical with the revolutionary movement. If whilst working
on the construction of the temple with the right hand, the left has to
wield the sword against a sudden attack of the enemy, the edifice
can rise only very slowly. Renan says (in his Future of Science) that
the great creations of thought appear in troublous times and that
neither material ease nor even liberty contributes much to the
originality and the energy of intellectual development. On the
contrary the work of mind would only be seriously threatened if
humanity came to be too much at its ease. Thank God! exclaims the
Breton philosopher, that day is still far distant. The customary state
of Athens, he continues, was one of terror; the security of the
individual was threatened at every moment, to-day an exile, to-
morrow he was sold as a slave. And yet in such a state Phidias
produced the Propylæa statues, Plato his dialogues and
Aristophanes his satires. Dante would never have composed his
cantos in an atmosphere of studious ease. The sacking of Rome did
not disturb the brush of Michael Angelo. In a word, the most beautiful
things are born amid tears and it is in the midst of struggle, in the
atmosphere of sorrow and suffering that humanity develops itself,
that the human mind displays the most energy and activity in all
directions. Renan was an individualist, and aristocratic in his
teachings, and seems only to have in view the individual, nay the
genius. Suffering and oppression, physical, intellectual and moral,
are schools where the strong gather more strength and come forth
triumphant, but where the weaker are destroyed. What is true for the
élite, for the very limited number of the chosen few, does not hold
good for humanity at large, which is not strong enough to think when
it is hungry, to fight against opposing forces and to hurl down the
barriers erected against the advance of thought. Few indeed are
those who can carry on the struggle to a successful issue. The
Russian government, with its Mongolian traditions of autocracy,
threw the great nation, which remained behind Peter’s forward
march, back into complete indifference and apathy, into a state of
submissive contentment, where, like a child, it kisses the rod that
punishes it, sometimes cries like a child, and is lulled to sleep by the
whisperings of mystic superstition and the vapours of vodki.
Has not the populace a terrifying example in the martyrs of
Russian thought? A terrible destiny awaits him who dares to step
beyond the line traced by the hand of the government, who ventures
to look over the wall erected by imperial ukase. “The history of
Russian thinkers,” says Alexander Herzen (Russland’s Sociale
Zustände, page 136), “is a long list of martyrs and a register of
convicts.” Those whom the hand of the imperial government has
spared died in the prime of youth, before they had time to develop,
like blossoms hurrying to quit life before they could bear fruit. A
Pushkin and a Lermontov fell in the prime of youth, one thirty-eight
and the other twenty-seven years old, victims of the unnatural state
of society. Russia’s Beaumarchais, Griboiedov, found a premature
end in Persia in his thirty-fifth year; Kolzov, the Russian Burns,
Bielinski, the Russian Lessing, died in misery, the latter at the age of
thirty-eight. Czerncevski was torn from his literary activity and sent to
Siberia. Dobrolubov sang his swan-song in his twenty-fifth year.
Chaadaev, the friend of Schelling, was declared mad by order of the
government. If such measures have kept the people in a state of
ignorance and still lowered the already low level of civilisation, the
autocratic rule has further, as it was unable to crush it, caused the
intelligentia to turn its thoughts into a certain direction.
If we follow the development of the Russian intelligentia we notice
at once that all the currents of its intellectual life are, at the present
time at least, converging into one centre, swelling the stream, that is
already running high, to a vast and mighty ocean, which is sending
its waters, through many channels, all over Europe. This centre is
literature. Since the foundation of the Academy of Science by Peter
the Great Russian achievements in the domains of science,
technical education, art, sculpture, music, painting, history and
philosophy have been very small.
In science and art the Russians have produced nothing of
importance, nothing original. Mendeleev, Lobatshevski, Pirogov,
Botkin, Soloviev are a few scientific names of some eminence but
they are few as compared with Europe and America. Many others,
who are known to the western world as Russians, are in reality
Germans or Armenians. The great historian, Karamzin, was of Tatar
extraction. In the domain of art Vereshchagin is a Russian but
Ainasowski is an Armenian, Brulov a Prussian and Antokolski a Jew
(cf. Brüggen, Das heutige Russland, p. 182).
Russia has had no Spinoza and no Kant, no Newton and no
Spencer. Since the foundation of the University of Moscow in 1755,
some semblance of Russian philosophy has appeared but a
Soloviev and a Grote, a Troitski and a Preobrajenski have only
introduced the philosophy of Germany, France, and England into
Russia, but not worked out their own philosophical systems. Thus,
whilst Russian scientists, technicians, artists and even musicians
have to go abroad to complete their education, Russian philosophers
borrow from Hegel or Descartes, from Locke or Comte. This is,
however, not the case with Russian literature. Russia has quickened
her development in the realm of literature. Her decades were
centuries. Rapidly she has lived through phases of growth and
evolution, of achievement and reflection which have filled long
periods in other people’s lives. The peaks of Russian creative power
in this domain, the productions of Pushkin and Turgeniev, of
Lermontov, Dostoievski and Tolstoi proudly face the heights of
literary western Europe.
Whilst, however, the Russian genius of the intelligentia centred its
force in literature, this literature bears the unmistakable trait, that
distinguishes it from European literature, of having a tendency to
teach and of taking a moral aspect. Russian literature on the whole
has not entered the sphere of artistic interest, it has always been a
pulpit whence the word of instruction came forth. With very few
exceptions, like Merejkovski and Andreiev, the Russian author is not
practising art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art) but is pursuing a goal, is
accomplishing a task.
The Russian literature is a long cry of revolt, a continuous sigh or
an admonition. Taine says, somewhere, when speaking of Stendhal
and Balzac: “They love art more than men—they are not writing out
of sympathy for the poor, but out of love for the beautiful.” This is just
what the Russian modern author is not doing. The intellectual and
instructive moments predominate over the emotional and artistic.
This state of the intellectual development is explained by what has
been stated above. It is due to the sudden introduction of western
ceremonies and superficial civilisation, followed by a powerful foreign
influence on the one hand, and the general social and political state
of the country. When Peter had suddenly launched Russia—which
was floating like some big hulk between Asia and Europe—towards
the west, the few who helped him in this endeavour came under the
complete influence of western thought and manners. St. Petersburg
soon became a Versailles in miniature. Voltaire, Diderot, and the
encyclopædists governed and shaped Russian thought and Russian
society. But not only France—Germany too, and England, Byron and
his individualism, had gained great sway in Russia. The
independence of Russian thought and its intellectual development
only dates from about 1840. When it awoke at that time, when it
became conscious of itself, it felt that it had a great work, a great
mission to fulfil. Surrounded on one side by a people that was
ignorant, ready to sink lower and lower; opposed, on the other, by a
government that did its best to check individualism and
independence in every possible way—the Russian intelligentia felt its
great responsibility.
Surrounded by a population whose mental development was on a
very low level, the atmosphere was and still is not propitious for the
cultivation of art or science, whilst the Russian author had no time
simply to admire the beautiful in nature but was compelled to look
round and try what good he could do. Thus Russian genius
concentrated itself in literature as the best vehicle to expose the
state of Russian society. The Russian writer became an apostle. He
is not anxious to be artistic, to shape his style and to be fascinating,
but to give as true a picture of Russian life as he possibly can, to
show the evil and to suggest the remedy.
Such, in broad lines, is the present state which the few, whom we
termed the Russian intelligentia, have reached in their intellectual
development. In a moment of strength the Russian genius has
attained itself, with self-asserting individuality. Its task is great, its
obstacles are manifold, but it fights valiantly and moves on steadily.
This only applies to the few. When the day of political freedom will
dawn for Russia, then and then only the great evolution and the
intellectual development of Russia itself, of the Russian people as a
whole, will begin. On the day when civil and religious despotism, that
everywhere crushes individuality, will cease, then the genius of the
Russian people will spread its pinions, and the masses will awake
from their inertia to new life, like the gradual unfolding of spring into
summer.
 CHAPTER I. LAND AND PEOPLE AND EARLY
HISTORY
EXTENT, CONFIGURATION, AND CLIMATE

To arrive at a just appreciation of Russia’s

[To 1054 a.d.] genius we must have a knowledge of the soil
that nourishes her, the peoples that inhabit her,
and the history through which she has passed. Let us begin with
nature, soil, and climate.
The first fact that strikes us in regard to the Russian empire is its
vastness.[2] Its colossal dimensions are so out of proportion to the
smallness of the greatest among European states, that, to bring
them within the sphere of human imagination, Alexander von
Humboldt, one of the greatest scientists of his century, makes the
statement that the portion of the globe under Russia’s dominion is
greater than the entire surface of the moon at its full.
The territories of that vast empire acknowledge no limits; its vast
plains stretch toward the heart of the old continent, as far as the
huge peaks of central Asia; they are stopped between the Black and
the Caspian seas by the great wall of the Caucasus, whose foot is
planted below the sea-level, and the height of whose summits
exceeds by eight hundred feet that of Mont Blanc.
 In lakes Ladoga and Onega, in the northwest, Russia possesses
the greatest lakes in Europe; in Lake Baikal, in Siberia, the greatest
in Asia; in the Caspian and Aral seas, the greatest in the world. Her
rivers equal her plains in proportion: the Obi, the Yenisei, the Amur,
in Asia; the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga, in Europe. The central
artery of Russia is the Volga—a river that, in its winding course of
nearly twenty-four hundred miles, is not altogether European. Nine
tenths of the Russian territory are as yet nearly empty of inhabitants,
and nevertheless the population, according to the census of 1897,
taken over all the empire except Finland, numbered 129,000,000;
and the annual increase is very nearly two million.
Europe is distinguished from other regions of the globe by two
characteristics which make her the home of civilisation: her land is
cut into by the seas—“cut into bits,” as Montesquieu says; she is,
according to Humboldt, “an articulated peninsula”; her other
distinctive advantage is a temperate climate which, in great measure
the result of her configuration, is duplicated nowhere under the same
latitude. Russia alone, adhering solidly to Asia by her longest
dimension, bordered on the north and northwest by icy seas which
permit to the borders few of the advantages of a littoral, is one of the
most compact and eminently continental countries of the globe.
She is deprived of the even, temperate climate due to Europe’s
articulated structure, and has a continental climate—nearly equally
extreme in the rigour of its winters and the torrid heat of its summers.
Hence the mean temperature varies.
The isothermal lines extend in summer toward the pole; in winter
they sink southward: so that the greater part of Russia is included in
January in the rigid, in July in the torrid zone. Her very vastness
condemns her to extremes. The bordering seas are too distant or too
small to serve her as reservoirs of warmth or basins of coolness.
Nowhere else in the Occident are to be found winters so long and
severe, summers so burning. Russia is a stranger to the great
influences that moderate the climate of the rest of Europe—the gulf
stream and the winds of the Sahara. The long Scandinavian
peninsula, stretching between Russia and the Atlantic, deflects from
her coasts the great warm current flowing from the New World to the
Old. In place of the gulf stream and the African deserts it is the polar
snows of Europe, and Siberia, the frozen north of Asia, that hold the
predominating influence over Russia. The Ural range, by its
insignificant elevation and its perpendicularity to the equator, is but
an inconsiderable barrier to these influences. In vain does Russia
extend south into the latitude of Pau and Nice; nowhere this side the
Caucasus will she find a rampart against the winds of the north. The
conformation of the soil, low and flat, leaves her open to all the
atmospheric currents—from the parching breath of the central Asian
deserts to the winds of the polar region.
This lack of mountains and inland seas deprives Russia of the
necessary humidity brought to the rest of Europe by the Atlantic and
laid up for it in the storehouses of the Alps. The ocean breezes reach
her only when empty of refreshing vapours; those of Asia are wrung
dry long before they touch her confines. The further the continent
stretches, the greater its poverty of rain. At Kazan the rainfall is but
half that of Paris. Hence the lack, over an enormous southern region,
of the two principal elements of fertility—warmth and moisture;
hence in part those wide, woodless, arid, un-European steppes in
the southeast of the empire.

THE SIMILARITY OF EUROPEAN AND ASIATIC RUSSIA

One whole formed of two analogous halves, Russia is in nowise a

child of Europe; but that is not to say that she is Asiatic—that we can
shelve her among the dormant and stationary peoples of the far
East. Far from it: Russia is no more Asiatic than she is European.
But in all physical essentials of structure, climate, and moisture, she
is opposed to historical, occidental Europe; in all these she is in
direct relation with the bordering countries of Asia. Europe proper
naturally begins at the narrowing of the continent between the Baltic
and the Black seas.
In the southeast there is no natural barrier between Russia and
Asia; therefore the geographers have in turn taken the Don, the
Volga, the Ural, or again the depression of the Obi, as boundaries.
Desert steppes stretch from the centre of the old continent into
Russia by the door left open between the Ural chain and the
Caspian. From the lower course of the Don to the Aral Sea, all these
low steppes on both banks of the Volga and the Ural rivers form the
bed of an old, dried-up sea, whose borders we can still trace, and
whose remnants constitute the great salt lakes known as the
Caspian and the Aral seas. By a hydrographical accident which has
had an enormous influence upon the character and destinies of the
people, it is into one of these closed Asiatic seas that the Volga, the
great artery of Russia, empties, after turning its back upon Europe
almost from its very source.
To the north of the Caspian steppes, from latitude 52° to the
uninhabitable polar regions, the longest meridional chain of
mountains of the old continent forms a wall between Russia and
Asia. The Russians in olden days called it the “belt of stone,” or “belt
of the world”; but, despite the name, the Ural indicates the end of
Asia on the one side, only to mark its recommencement, almost
unaltered, on the European slope. Descending gradually by terraces
on the European side, the Ural is less a chain than a plateau
crowned with a line of slight elevations. It presents principally low
ridges covered with forests, like those of the Vosges and the Jura.
So greatly depressed is the centre that along the principal passes
between Russia and Siberia (from Perm to Iekaterinburg, for
example) the eye looks in vain for the summits; in constructing a
railroad through the pass the engineers had no long tunnels to build,
no great difficulties to surmount. At this high altitude, where the
plains are snow-bound during six or seven months, no peak attains
the limit of eternal snows, no valley enbosoms a glacier.
In reality the Ural separates neither the climates, nor the fauna
and flora. Extending almost perpendicularly from north to south, the
polar winds blow almost equally unhindered along both sides; on
both, the vegetation is the same. It is not till the heart of Siberia is
reached—the upper Yenisei and Lake Baikal—that one finds a
different soil, a new flora and fauna. The upheaval of the Ural failed
to wipe out the resemblance and the unity of the two regions it
divides. Instead of a wall between the Russias, it is merely a
storehouse of mineral wealth. In the rocks, of eruptive or
metamorphic origin, are veins of metals not found in the regular
strata of the great plains. It no more separates one from the other
than does the river of the same name; and when one day Siberia
shall boast a denser population, the Ural will be regarded as the
axis, the backbone of the two great halves of the empire.

THE DUALISM OF NORTH AND SOUTH

Unity in immensity is Russia’s chief characteristic. From the huge

wall of the Caucasus to the Baltic this empire, in itself greater than all
the rest of Europe, in its numerous provinces presents perhaps less
variety of climate than west European countries whose area is ten or
twelve times less. This is on account of the flat uniformity. And yet,
underlying this homogeneity of climate and configuration, nature has
marked with special characteristics and a distinct individuality a
number of regions which, divided into two groups, embrace all
European Russia. Equally flat, with a climate nearly equally extreme,
these two great zones, notwithstanding their similarity, present a
remarkable contrast in soil, vegetation, moisture, and most other
physical and economic conditions. One is the forest region, the other
the woodless zone of the steppes; they divide the empire into almost
equal halves.
From the opposition, from the natural dualism of the steppe and
the forest, has sprung the historical antagonism and the now-ended
strife between the two halves of Russia—the struggle between the
sedentary north and the nomad south; between the Russian and the
Tatar; between the Muscovite state laid in the forest region, and the
free Cossacks, children of the steppes. The forest region, though
ceaselessly diminished by cutting, still remains the more extensive.
Occupying the entire north and centre, it grows wider from east to
west, from Kazan to Kiev.
Beyond the polar circle no tree can withstand the intensity and
permanence of the frost. On both sides of the Ural, in the
neighbourhood of Siberia, stretch vast boggy plains (toundras),
perpetually frost-bound, and clothed with moss. In these latitudes no
cultivation is possible, no pasturage but lichens is to be obtained, no
animal but the reindeer can exist. Hunting and fishing are the sole
occupations of the few inhabitants who make their dwelling in these
lands of ice.
The soil of the wooded plains, at least in the northwest, from the
White Sea to the Niemen and the Dnieper, is low, swampy, and
peaty, intersected by arid sandy hills. The Valdai Hills, the highest
plateau, scarcely attain the height of one thousand feet. This region
is rich in springs and is the source of all the great rivers. The flatness
of the land prevents the rivers from assuming a distinctly marked
course, and as no ridge intervenes, their waters at the thaw run
together and form enormous swamps; or, travelling slowly down
undefined slopes, form at the bottom vast lakes like the Ladoga, a
veritable inland sea, or strings of wretched little pools, like the eleven
hundred lakes in the government of Archangel.
The population, though scattered over wide expanses and
averaging less than fifteen to the square mile, fails to wring from the
unfriendly soil a sufficient nourishment. Wheat will not thrive; barley,
rye, and flax alone flourish. A multitude of small industries eke out
the livelihood for which agriculture is insufficient.
The augmentation of the scattered population is scarcely
perceptible having, so to speak, reached the point of saturation.
Russia can hope for an increase of wealth and population in this
desolate northland only upon the introduction into it of industrial
pursuits, as in the case of Moscow and the Ural regions.
Russian civilisation finds a great, though by no means
insurmountable obstacle in the extremes of temperature. It must be
remembered that Europe enjoys a temperate climate unparalleled in
her fairest colonies, while other continents, for analagous reasons,
labour under much the same disadvantages as Russia. The climate
of the northern portion of the United States greatly resembles that of
south Russia, while New York, Pennsylvania, and the New England
states pass through the same extremes of temperature as the
steppes of the Black Sea.

THE SOIL OF THE BLACK LANDS AND THE STEPPES

 The Black Lands, one of the largest and most fertile agricultural
tracts in the world, occupy the upper part of the woodless zone at its
juncture with the forest and lake district. Obtaining moisture and
shelter from the latter, the Black Lands enjoy much more favourable
climatic conditions than the steppes of the extreme south. They
derive their name (tchernoziom) from a stratum of black humus, of
an average depth of from one and a half to five feet, consisting partly
of loam, partly of oily clay mixed with organic substances. It 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 coal-black paste. The formation of this wonderfully
fertile layer is attributed to the slow decomposition of the steppe
grasses, accumulated during many centuries.
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 Transcaucasia 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 soil—who
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
Costume worn by Cossack of the
Ukraine
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 Ural-Altaic 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 are russified, and
that quite recently: 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,
A Tatar
like the Lapp; pastoral, like the
Bashkir; sedentary and (Russian)
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 to-day 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

THE SLAVS

As to the Slavs, who form the nucleus of the Russian population, it

is now generally recognised that they migrated to Russia from the
neighbourhood of the Carpathian Mountains. The Byzantine
annalists of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh centuries,
speaking of the Slavs, whom they called Sklaboi, a name appearing
as early as the end of the fifth century, distinguish two branches of
them: the Ants, living from the Danube to the mouth of the Dnieper;
and the Slavs, properly so named, living northeast of the Danube
and as far to the east as the source of the Vistula, and on the right
bank of the Dniester. In this, their statement agrees with that of
Jornandes,l the historian of the Goths. Some Russian scholars
suppose that before coming to the Danube the Slavs lived near the
Carpathians, whence they invaded the Byzantine empire. These
encroachments, beginning as far back as the third century, resulted
in the penetration of the Slavs into southern Austria and the Balkan
peninsula. Byzantine annalists of the sixth and seventh centuries,
Procopius and the emperor Maurice, who had to fight the Slavs in
person, speak of them as being ever on the move: “They live in
woods and on the banks of rivers, in small hamlets, and are always
ready to change their abode.” At the same time these Byzantine
annalists describe this people as exceedingly fond of liberty. “From
the remotest period,” says Procopius,d “the Slavs were known to live