GEOGRAPHY IN RUSSIAN HISTORY 9 



tiers encountered in Europe were either not present at all in Asia or else 

 were too weak to offer substantial resistance. Hence Eussia has in the 

 last 100 years pushed out to the confines of India and China and added 

 millions of square miles to her territory beyond the Caspian and in 

 southern Siberia. In one place, she has even gone beyond what would 

 appear as the normal physical boundary : in the conquest of the trans- 

 Caucasus she has begun a march that points to the Persian Gulf as her 

 ultimate goal. 



Turning now to the more intimate relation of the great Eussian 

 plain to the people who have made it their own, a number of striking 

 facts appear. In the first place, it has produced and preserved for the 

 whole vast central area a common physical type, a common religion and 

 a common language. The 125 million Eussians occupying this central 

 territory of the Eussian plain, as has been often pointed out, show a 

 truly astounding uniformity of head formation when one takes into 

 consideration the size of the territory and the number of people in- 

 volved. The variation in cephalic index, according to ethnologists, is 

 only about 5 points around 82. That is to say, the Eussian not only 

 belongs to the round-headed type, but the ratio between the length and 

 the width of head among the 125 millions varies astonishingly little 

 when compared with the variation in the cephalic index in races whose 

 habits and environment show greater variety. Among the Italians, for 

 example, it is as high as 14 instead of 5 as in Eussia, and in France it 

 is 10. Yet both the territory and the number of people involved in each 

 case is very much smaller. A further point of some interest is the fact 

 that Slavic skulls thirteen centuries old, found in this region, exhibit 

 the same peculiarity. Evidently the absorption of the Varangians, and 

 later, of the Turco-Finnish tribes of the region, has in no way affected 

 the head formation. The power of the great plain is dominant and the 

 uniformity and monotony of the land reflects itself in an unparalleled 

 extension over a vast area of a uniform type of head formation. 



It would be a mistake, however, to leave the impression that, since a 

 common head formation prevails among the Eussians, they are alike in 

 other respects. Quite apart from the many alien races on the frontier, 

 there are three main groups among the Eussians themselves, differing 

 from one another not only in dialects, habits and disposition, but phys- 

 ically as well. 



First there are the Great Eussians numbering over 82,000,000 and 

 much the largest of the three groups. They occupy the heart of Eussia 

 with Moscow as the center. Second is the Little Eussian, about 37,000,- 

 000 strong. He holds the territory south and southwest, including the 

 Don Cossacks, and his center is at the old and first capital of the Eus- 

 sians, on the Dnieper at Kiev. Third is the White Eussian, about 5,000,- 

 000 in number, in lands east of Poland and northward around Lithua- 



