The Future of Siberia Author(S): Harald Swayne Source: the Geographical Journal, Vol

The Future of Siberia Author(s): Harald Swayne Source: The Geographical Journal, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Mar., 1918), pp. 149-159 Published by: geographicalj Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1779375 Accessed: 26-06-2016 04:41 UTC

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square miles?and on the other side the Central Powers have occupied some? thing less than a quarter of that great amount. The position of Turkey at the end of what she is pleased to consider a victorious war seems to me to be deplorable; she has not only lost one hundred thousand square miles of territory in Arabia, but has parted with her greatest centres of faith and com- merce: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Erzerum and Trebizond. And it is pleasant to recall that the valiant Belgian army, to whom we owed so much at the commencement of the war, now occupies territory in German East Africa nearly seven times as great as the Germans are occupying in Belgium. These are great results, and they are not to be lightly set aside, as we have just heard so eloquently said by the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Walter Long. We cannot ignore them, for they will inevitably in the future, in the good time when the settlement comes, be trump cards in the hands of England. Those of us who have travelled, particularly in East Africa, must be well aware of the conditions that obtain there, and the opportunities for colonization of which General Smuts has spoken. There is possibly not much room for white colonization, and it is for this Society to collect all the evidence that can be obtained regarding the extent 'of colonizable country and the people best suited for it. But there are vast numbers of native people through? out all the darker parts of Africa to whom there can be no possible idea or vision of self-government. Such people must necessarily be educated; they must by slow degrees be taught, first of all, the rudiments of civilization, and finally be brought to something like a national sense of responsibility; and when we consider who is to undertake that education we can well feel the weight of responsibility which probably rests with us. We may at least hope that the education of these peoples will fall into the hands of those who, by tradition and long experience, are best able to adapt a rule based on fair play, justice, sympathy, and humanity. I will now ask you by your acclamation to join in thanking General Smuts for his kindness in coming here and giving us such an admirable address.

THE FUTURE OF SIBERIA Colonel Harald Swayne, C.M.G., R.E. Read at the Meeting of the Society, 10 December 1917.

MY sportsman personal knowledgein 1903, when of Siberia I left thearises railway from andtwo river-steamersvisits, first as a and covered 800 miles of trail away from both; and secondly, as a visitor to the Siberian Railway just before the outbreak of war, up to the middle of July 1914. Without claiming in any way to be an authority on the country, I can, I think,fshow you what the south looks like in summer and what is going on there. If excuse were needed I have another for coming before you : that having spent the whole of my working life in the East, and at any time in thirty-two years having travelled on hunting trails or on duty to such regions as Tibet, Ladak, Baltistan, Gilgit, and the Chin- Lushai Hills of Upper Burma, I have approached Siberian questions with some knowledge of Asia and its great mountain barriers/and with an ever-

This content downloaded from 157.89.65.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 04:41:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 15? THE FUTURE OF SIBERIA present curiosity to see what was beyond. I ask you to share with me this attitude of mind as we travel across a green sector of the Earth which had lain for centuries unoccupied, except by nomad tribes who would together amount only to the population of four or five good-sized English towns. I will first give you my impressions of the Altai region, visited by com- paratively few strangers from this country, and that chiefly for sport. Siberia has already lost its old terrors, and we now know that there is a north and south. The most living memory the word "Siberia" brings back to me is of harvest: five o'clock in the morning of what turned out to be a broiling day in June, near Cherga in the Altai; when, going along a very ordinary road, I met a long string of country carts and of farm horses, ridden by men, women, and children, all mixed up astride the horses in twos and threes, going to their work; harvest scents and wild flowers every where. Again, a June morning on the slopes falling to a lake, masses of flowers stretching across a valley in mile-long sweeps, surpassing the wild flowers even of Switzerland and Kashmir at their best. Perhaps my first introduction to Siberia, shortly before the Russo- Japanese War, left all the more vivid impressions because I had come from, and had been living for some years in, crowded tropical countries. I came suddenly to Russian colonization with food of the best. At every post-house were turkeys, geese, fresh butter, and excellent tea, with the samovar of hot water available at any time of the day. Outside at the edge of the forest, engaged in sawing timber, would be the owner of the farm and his two sons, all broad-shouldered fellows over six feet. They owned no man as master, save perhaps the police. The hut was tidily carpentered of well-cut planks, with double windows, well-fitting shutters, and doors which really shut; dry moss or felt was stuffed between the joints of the logs or planks. The occupants can keep warm, for fuel is cheap, growing at the doors of most settlements in the Siberian Altai. Lots of children paddled about the house with the geese; and round the Altai home I am describing were beautiful forest-covered hills. Wheat was growing in patches in the valleys, wherever the ground was level enough for it. The huts were generally of two rooms with a large brick stove, with a flat, broad top for the family to sleep on in winter, and there were fixed plank beds round the walls, all good and plain. In 1903 my objective?wild-sheep ground of the Mongolian Altai? was approached by the Chuiski road, then nearing completion as a cart- track. The distance by steamer and trail is 750 miles from Novo- Nikolaevsk, otherwise called Ob station, where the great railway crosses the Ob, to Kosh-agach, the last Russian police post within 30 miles or so of the Chinese-Mongolian border. Of this journey the distance from Novo-Nikolaevsk to Bisk, with a few hours' halt on the way to Barnaul, is done now by river-steamer, 400 miles; then from Bisk to Kosh-agach 350 miles by tarantass, with a troika team of three horses. At that time-

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This content downloaded from 157.89.65.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 04:41:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms *5* THE FUTURE OF SIBERIA about half had to be ridden, with baggage on pack-ponies, and it took you, from London to the Mongolian border, about twenty-seven days. I think Major Cumberland and, later, Mr. Littledale were the first British sportsmen to visit the Altai; there is a good description of the latter's journey in Prince Demidov's book. I only followed in their footsteps. This track by the Katun and the Chuya gorges gives access to some of the best scenery. The whole district was the private property of the Tsar, administered by the Imperial Cabinet. In 1903 the wooden town at Ob railway station, Novo-Nikolaevsk, was a primitive place with wide unmetalled roads, mere open spaces, dusty, and very dark at night; on the outskirts of the town grew low fir woods; and near the fine railway bridge spanning the Ob was a landing- stage for the steamers. At that time fortunes had already been made by the coming of the railway. Wooden townships were springing up; incomers who had been needy peasants in Russia were already prosperous and had taken to trade or become hotel-keepers, and acquired education mean- while. The town, in addition to its Mongolian trade, exported large quantities of butter to Denmark and England. The river steamer is crowded with shopkeepers, traders, and miners going up to Barnaul and Bisk, and peasants passing between river-side stations where you stop to take in firewood for engines. The peasants are big, muscular, quiet men, with thick tow-like hair, and they are, I should say, the finest-looking men of the white-skinned race one sees; for the large type is probably more widely distributed among Slavs than among other European races. The powerful engines are forcing your light-draft boat southwards against the will of the river, which here, in places nearly as wide as the Thames at London Bridge, comes down in spring and summer full from the glaciers of Byelukha on its journey of 2500 miles over the Siberian plains and the unexplored forests and swamps of the Taiga and Tundra Lands, to its estuary in the Kara Sea. The brown muddy stream, fat with alluvial soil, flows in a swift, smooth, determined sheet, reflecting the sky like burnished copper, between green cultivation or lonely pasture, with considerable herds of cows, sheep, or horses. Occasionally a diminu- tive wooden church, with cupola in copper green and gold, reflects the sun, and a huddle of brown log chalets with deep-eaved roofs overlooks some scarped river curve; an island with low forest, or sandbank white with river-gulls, appears ahead; or a line of higher forest in the blue-grey dis? tance upstream seems to bar your path. It was like the Upper Thames at the landing-stages; pollarded trees with short thick trunks overhung the water's edge,in meadows containing big barns and cows grazing against a background of dark woods. By noon it may be uncomfortably hot, hotter than English summer weather. Large timber-rafts came down the river on their way to the imperial saw-mills at Novo-Nikolaevsk. On the many miles of reaches of the great river between Barnaul and

This content downloaded from 157.89.65.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 04:41:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms TIMBER RAFTS ON THE OB

FERRY ON THE KATUN NEAR UST-INYA

The illustrations, from negatives by Colonel Swayne, have already appeared in his book ' Through the Highlands of Siberia, published by Messrs. Rowland Ward, to whom we are indebted for permission to use them here.

This content downloaded from 157.89.65.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 04:41:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CLIFFS ON THE CHUYA NEAR AIGULAK

RIVER TERRACES ON THE CHUYA NEAR JUNCTION WITH KATUN

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ON THE CHUYA NEAR KOSH-AGACH

TENGINSKOE LAKE This content downloaded from 157.89.65.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 04:41:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ON THE CHUYA NEAR KOSH-AGACH

THE VACCINATOR OF KUAKTENAR

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Bisk the scenery gradually changes; woods rise every where; the river is flooded with snow-water; we steam hard against a strong current through a wilderness of tree-covered islands and glassy water-lanes, with distant views of large forest. In places the river cuts through low plateaux, with steep sides, where even in June, when the days are already giving Indian heat and the nights only a summer coolness, streaks of snow coming down to the water's edge bear witness to the rapid onrush of summer in these

Sketch Map showing* COLONEL H SWAYNES ROUTE

SIBERIA

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regions j before reaching Bisk the river perceptibly narrows. Distant snow-capped mountains are dimly seen. We are* in some of the richest pastures of the world, with herds of cattle and ponies everywhere; but further on pine forest covers all the land, and mountains showing more vivid blue, snow-streaked, block the southern horizon. Bisk, the summit of navigation, is a wooden town smaller than Barnaul. Though in the heart of Asia it is as Russian as any town in Russia, and is civilized though primitive. It has many well-to-do residents, a club

This content downloaded from 157.89.65.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 04:41:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 154 THE FUTURE OF SIBERIA where the strains of a good band were heard, two-storied wooden inns, and many stone houses. Yet Bisk, at night, in stormy weather was dreary. The rain-soaked plank side walks were unlit and not to be distinguished from the black quagmires full of pools and holes called streets; while large savage dogs, like those of Tibet, barked from the houses and rattled and strained at their chains, Leaving the boat for good here, and using three-horsed tarantasses, you cross a bend of the Ob by horse ferry, and drive more or less along the valley of the swift Katun River, entering later the gorge of its tributary, the rushing little Chuya. There is much flax and hemp cultivation to be seen here, on what we should call in India black cotton soil; and at 60 miles from Bisk you reach Altaiskoe, picturesquely situated in the pine-clad foothills of the Altai, and likely to become a holiday resort. At a village beyond Ongudai a trader in the horns of the Maral or Altai stag lived in a wooden farmhouse standing in a large maralnik or deer-park; in June he was sawing off the horns, in the velvet, from the live stag held in an iron eage. The horns grow again each year; but one wishes it could be done under an anaesthetic. As a result of this trade in horns along the Chinese border the maral is practically exterminated over great areas, and one only finds weathered bones and pieces of horn in the Siberian and Mongolian Altai. The horns are an article of medicine in China. The approach to the basin of the Tenginskoe lake is in exquisite scenery, You drive through glades brilliant with blue, orange and lemon- yellow blossoms, to a cutting through a saddle, whence the track falls steeply to a wide level valley in an amphitheatre of hills, by way of a smaller valley, flat and smooth as a lawn, ablaze with flowers, through a mile-wide natural avenue of cedars and pines. The plain, 3 miles in extent, shelves to a nearly circular lake, and stately outlying groups of cedars stand forward from the walls of thick forest. Cattle were grazing, and mounted Kalmuks or Kirghiz were galloping wildly round the herds. On the margin of the lake were huts like North American Indian tents, and some stock-yards. At Ust-Inya, a village near the junction of the Katun and the Chuya Rivers, were many Christianized Kalmuks, and my tent servant Matai had a fine house here, his family living on amicable terms with several Russian working peasants. The long treks onward show the best scenery in the Altai. As you enter the Chuya Gorge. you get deeper into the Kalmuk country, where Russians are seldom met, and where you may come upon pony-skins hung in the sun and wind, on sloping scaffoldings, as a sacrifice. In this superb track up the gorge, following the little river for 150 miles, you pass ground like the bear and the ibex haunts at the mouth of the Sindh valley in Kashmir; I could see little difference from that familiar scene, and it was a joy to be looking up again at the steep pinnacles of grey rock falling sheer for hundreds of feet to quiet pine slopes. At one point the

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road, with new timber posts and railings winding up a hill through forest, reminded me very forcibly of our own hill stations of Murree and Simla. There was a little wheat cultivation alternating with Alpine pasture on the valley bottom. On such a journey you would perhaps pass the Ispravnik?in Anglo- Indian phrase the district superintendent of police?in smart clean uniform, sitting in his carriage, and following the advance of the road iabourers. At Kuaktenar, in a precipitous gorge, the pine-topped cliffs contain ibex with horns up to 38 inches long. A few miles further on we are at the outermost Russian police post, the village of Kosh-agach, the home of about half a dozen families of Russian or of Kalmuk settlers and traders. There is nothing whatever between this and the first Chinese Amban's post about 40 miles away across the Mongolian border. At Kosh-agach there were in those days a Russian customs ofrlcial and two trading companies dealing with Kobdo, tp which place there is a cart track over the hills. They also sold all that a settler needs, farm imple- ments and outfit. Wool of many kinds was collected in parcels from the nomads, washed here, and exported to buyers at Bisk, who sell to agents in Russia; and long camel-hair was exported for the manufacturer of machine belting in Russia. We have now left the maze of forested hills called the Siberian Altai and emerged into the open treeless country of the Mongolian Altai. We look south-east across a level steppe at the mountains of Chinese Mongolia, having reached the true end of things Russian or Russianized; but about 30 miles away is the divide between the Chinese Dominions and Siberia, and on either side of that divide are grassy hills, 8000 to 9000 feet high, very sparsely inhabited by Kirghiz or Kalmuks or Turki-Tartar or Mongol nomads of various or mixed descent, professing a thin diluted form of Mohammedanism, Buddhism, or Shamanism. Before you is a flat depression between the Siberian and Mongolian Altai, the Chuiskaya Steppe, about 5000 feet above the sea; probably an old lake-bed, 40 miles by 12, its length nearly east and west. It is cold, grey, and cheerless, swept by bitter winds from open Mongolia. In front, across the plain, is a gap in the hills marking the Chagan stream and pass, up which you may go; and on your right, 6 miles further west, another gap, the Tarkuta Pass and stream, by which you may return. Those passes take you, at about 9000 feet or more, over the divide into Mongolia. There are wild duck in swampy places and pools, and a few Prjevalsky's gazelle, called Yeren, may perhaps be detected making off a mile away, for they see you long before you will see them. Near the Chagan Burgazu stream will probably be a few low tents of the nomads. The slopes above, except where they become steep and break into rocky cliffs, look like Beachy Head or other high downs. The nomads' flocks wander in the sheltered valleys, while the wild ram, as large as a small donkey, with

This content downloaded from 157.89.65.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 04:41:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms i56 THE FUTURE OF SIBERIA a smooth skin like a deer, moves restlessly about the heights. The dere- lict skulls and horns of the great rams brought down by the stream lie with driftwood, rotten and half buried in shingle, where the channel has been scooped out in flood-time. Under certain rocks.and in caves, prob? ably the lairs of wolves, you can find large numbers of skeletons and skulls, and it seems likely that the rams are driven there and killed. As you come to the passes, the hills become precipitous and forbidding, with deep snow couloirs. There is a bad track, half water, half boulders, almost too rough for ponies, and patches of old snow-slip many yards deep fill the bottom of the gorge which runs narrowly up to the Chinese divide; when it finally turns into a saddle between two rounded peaks, and the ground begins to fall away in front, you are looking southwards into Chinese Mongolia. In front a fine valley falls away to the south- east, leading to the first Chinese post, the Suok Karaul, visited at intervals by a Chinese Amban. The Russian post of Kosh-agach is over 40 miles away as the crow flies. From these downs one sees Mus-Tau emerging from grey-green slopes, to rise into eternal snow at anything up to 11,000 or 12,000 feet. There are peak upon peak, down upon down, shallow valley beyond shallow valley, for a hundred miles or more; but nowhere can one perceive any dark shadows which would indicate trees or any con? siderable cultivation. Powar, the hunter, used to be ready at four or five in the morning; we would be in the saddle by half-past, he and I on our two ponies, with telescope and rifle, a bit of wild mutton, a tin of sardines, a box of biscuits in the saddlebag, and a water-bottle and blanket each; and we would lead back on foot many a weary mile after dark, having spent a long day on the solitary top of a green world; and this walk homeward, tired out, would be to the music of the howling of little packs of wolves engaged in roundingup wild sheep. The Siberian wolves seem to get enough game, and do not trouble people much?the terrible wolf stories coming generally from forests near European Russian towns in winter. We found one wolf bolting from the fresh bones of a ram he had killed; and I missed another asleep on a plain, who got up and yawned as I fired, spoiling my shot. On one of these days I saw a line of dark figures on horseback, dressed in long coats, and back at the bivouac later we discovered them camping 2 miles away, where horses, cattle, long-haired yaks and sheep were being rounded up, apparently for stock-taking. They were the first inhabitants we had seen on the Chinese side, though we had reconnoitred the country on horseback for many days. A few days later my hunter was sent across to their felt huts to buy a sheep, and three Mongols rode back with him, good-natured, smiling, honest fellows in sheepskins, who offered me snuff from a jar with a long-handled spoon, mare's milk cheese, and very sour butter. These concoctions have not probably changed since Marco Polo's day.

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In a developed Siberia of the future, much of the Altai will be a populous mining district. It will be in most ways also to Southern Siberia what Switzerland is now to Europe, and incidentally, its beautiful scenery and good climate in summer will attract visitors from the towns.

In 1914 I went from Dalny to Moscow in a leisurely way, starting in the Japanese ordinary train and changing later to the Russian at Chang- chun, to join the Siberian railway main line at Kharbin. The ordinary trains are more interesting than the through sleeping-car, as one sees more of the stopping-places and of the real Siberian passengers and resldents. From Dalny you travel all day over the cultivated plains of Manchuria between somewhat bare hills; and passing over the battlefields of Liau- Yang and Mukden arrive at Chang-chun. Hitherto you have been in a Japanese train under Japanese officials and chiefly Japanese passengers; and at that time, June 1914, escorts of Japanese soldiers on the train. Every few hundred yards along the line were posted Japanese sentries and pickets; the whole railway world had been Japanese, with an occasional stray Chinese-Manchurian peasant looking on in a detached way. But at Chang-chun there is not only a Japanese railway station and hotel, but also a Russian station, land I think a Russian hotel, and they are two totally difFerent worlds, a few minutes' walk apart. Henceforth there were Russian passengers, Russian train-escorts, Russian sentries and pickets along the line, and on both sides of the frontier for long distances' military punctilio was observed. The passengers were most of them Siberian business men or farmers, with a sprinkling of Germans. The social atmosphere of these railway towns strikes one very forcibly at first, after a stay of some months in long- settled, civilized, orderly Japan, where everything is neatly organized, and houses, doors, windows, rickshaws, handcarts are all to Japanese scale. From this atmosphere you are here in Siberia suddenly jolted into growing colonial life, where all is makeshift; rough cart-tracks instead of roads, muddy tarantasses and country carts, troika teams and pairs, dilapidated harness, and roughly dressed uncouth-looking prairie men and miners of many races : there were large town buildings, large wagons, tall doors and windows, everything on the big and heavy scale. Theiscene at a railway station is of unfailing interest. The station-yard will be full of muddy carriages and ,peasant-carts, and there will be well- dressed, civilized-looking, soft passengers, residents of the town or farm, military officers, police officials, and rough prairie men or miners, barefoot white children, Kalmuks, Manchurians, Mongolians, Kirghiz, and even people hailing from Turkestan. These mixed nationalities all jostle comfort- ably together, promenading up and down or bargaining at the peasants' tables spread under sheds at the back of the platform, exhibiting turkeys, poultry, and pork ready cooked in large pots. There was plenty of milk, at a penny a quart, or about a penny-halfpenny with the bottle; cream, butter, jam, home-

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made bread, sometimes fish, and every kind of farm produce. I never got better or cheaper food in all my travels ; and everywhere where Russians had settled, even far up in the Altai, say 600 or 700 miles from the railway, the same abundance was noticed. When one comes fresh from big cities in England or elsewhere, one realizes how much better off, in some ways, these people in Siberia are, though fighting with hands and brain against what was lately virgin ground. The effect of all this settling of Siberia upon the Russians will be stimulating to the old country, just as our dominions have stimulated us with new ideas and fresh points of view. After living in a country like Western Europe, where every foot of land belongs to some one and is tied up for generations unborn, and where life becomes more and more a matter of fitting oneself comfort- ably into artificial and conventional surroundings, these vast spaces set one dreaming of the progress of a new race, away from Europe, unhampered by the debris of dying prejudices and the cast-iron restrictions of vested interests. Siberia?the belt along the railway?has an area already known to be suitable for cultivation and settlement of about two and a half times that of France; its centre is not only within about eight or nine days' journey of Western Europe, but it has a more reasonable climate than that of northern parts of the American continent in the same latitudes, not being subject to such severe storms; and also its main cross communications are already there in its great navigable rivers. The Irtish, Ob, Yenisei, Lena, and the Siberian part of the Amur River have together a navigable length of nearly 11,000 miles, without counting tributaries and possibilities of canals in the future, and this not all through wilderness, but a large part through cultivable country which will be thoroughly settled up some day. Goods and raw material have already an outlet north, east, and west; and when railway systems have been developed towards Persia in the south-west, there will even be an outlet by ancient routes to India? that world's reservoir of crowded humanity, of intelligence and of labour, both cheap and skilled, where a man can live without the hard cash which is necessary before it is possible to buy clothing and shelter in the more difrlcult north. But in order fully to utilize the northern cultivable parts of Siberia it seems likely that it will be necessary to throw overboard the habits of Western Europeans in the past, and take to the idea of " wintering abroad." It would be impossible to live, bring up children, build com- fortable houses, supply the people with food, and carry on the usual complicated business of educated civil life with a winter average tempera? ture of about 650 to 750 Fahr. of frost; the game as we play it in more temperate lands would not be worth the candle. But with quick railways and tramways and all kinds of easy transit and haulage, agricultural machinery, plentiful fuel, and modern power-stations?without counting all the future possibilities of aircraft for at least postal services?there

This content downloaded from 157.89.65.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 04:41:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE FUTURE OF SIBERIA: DISCUSSION 159 seems no reason why the north, whose food-producing capacities in many localities are undoubted, should be left unused because of the cold season. Great masses of labour are already migratory according to season in various parts of the world; and, given the possibility at some time in the future of doing most farm work by machinery, it does not require much stretch of imagination to foretell the likelihood of these northern lands being developed by capitalists having summer farms in the north and winter industries in Europe or Southern Asia. The wealth of the harvests on cheap land might stand the cost of the annual migration of the moderate amount of expert white or northern labour required. An experienced Siberian business friend said in 1914 that such methods would pay, but that such experiments could not be carried out under the Government system of that time. There is an immediate effect of this great war which may help to accelerate the development of Siberia. The world is short of food, and the still unbroken lands of Siberia are awaiting development. What better task for Russia than, helped by the combined organizing powers of the United States and Western Europe, to make a great expedition against those lands awaiting the plough ? Behind the opposing combatant lines to-day are improvised road-towns, railway towns, canal towns and camps, great cranes, great guns, all sprung?where were no towns before?in the twinkling of an eye. Could some Russian Government, on the conclusion of peace, divert a small fraction of that organized energy into the placing of tractors and skilled mechanics and agriculturalists on to those vast unbroken lands ? It seems to me that the obstacles are such as a great world-wide emergency might break down.

Before the paper the President said: I need hardly introduce the lecturer, Colonel Harald Swayne, who is distinguished as a traveller and even better known as a sportsman. He will tell us something of what he has seen in a part of the world which must be of great interest to us just now?Siberia, and I will not detain you further with any remarks of mine.

(Colonel Swayne then read the paper printed above > and a discussion followed.) The President : That part of Siberia with which the lecturer has been dealing is only the fringe of Southern Siberia within reach of the railway. Hereafter I hope that from points on the railway there may be stretches of country reclaimed and brought under cultivation that will enormously increase the cultivable area of Siberia, which is already big enough to accommodate something like half the population of Russia. We have yet to learn what exactly are the conditions of climate and soil in Siberia, which may permit the cultivation of wheat in latitudes far more northern than any yet tried. In Canada it has been found quite possible to cultivate wheat much further north than anybody had expected ; it may be the same in Siberia. Russian methods of colonization no doubt differ from ours: they are slower, and I think in some ways they are surer. I am very glad to near that the Russian Government took some precaution in placing the right class of people on the land, because in other parts of the world they have not been successful.

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