50 SIUKUIA. 



rnimied couple, ami clearly sliows that the Vakuts are a cattle reariiij,' people of the steppes 

 oi' Central Asia, accitlentully driven to the forest zuuc of the cruel north. The trari.sition of 

 the most northern Yakuts to reindeei- breeding in a region unsuited to horned cattle and horses, 

 confirms this llioory. The reindeer in the polar tundra zone number about 50 thousand head, 

 or about 200 head lor every 100 inhabitants of reindeer breeding population. Small animals 

 are not raised in llic Yakutsk region except the tlogs used for travelling in the polar tundra 

 zone, wliii'li are kepi by the indigenous tribes in even greater numbers than in JCa^t'TU 

 Siberia. 



All that has been said about tin' Yakutsk frontier country, where there is no regular 

 agricultural zone, clearly shows that this region has but very little importance for settled 

 Russian colonization and that this most extensive portion of Siberia is destined by nature 

 itself to be inhabited by wandering or nomadic tribes or by those who from time immemorial 

 have been aborigenes of polar countries, hyperboreans or nomads, who have found their way 

 hitlicr from the plains of Central Asia and succeeded somehow in acclimating themselves in 

 the forest zone of the north. This region can be of only one use to Russia, on account of 

 the impossibility of peopling it by means of settled agi'icultural colonization, which was effect- 

 ed under such favourable circumstances in the agricultural zone of Siberia proper and in 

 the country round about the Altai mountains; the Yakutsk region might, like British Amer- 

 ica, excepting Canada, be organized for w'orking the natural riches of the country which, 

 without doubt, exist there but they are distributed, as has been already mentioned, in 

 scanty and scattered layers over the enormous surface of the coldest land of the Old World. 



There is no positive evidence to show^ that the stranger tribes of the Yakutsk region 

 are decreasing in numbers, or in other words dying out; but of late years this opinion has 

 been expresseil by people well acquainted with Siberia. If this only referred to the small 

 polar tribes of the Yakutsk frontier country, such as the Lamuts, Ukagirs, Koryaks, Tchou- 

 vans and Tchuktchis it would be highly probable. Before the arrival of the Yakuts these 

 tribes were spread much more to the south and occupied a far greater expanse of country, 

 and on being driven from their former place of habitation by the Yakuts they congregated 

 about the north-east polar tundra part of the Yakutsk frontier country and the Chukotsk penin- 

 sula. Every country has, however, a limit of capacity in relation to the population inhabiting 

 it, depending upon the conditions of climate and soil and the state of culture of the inhabi- 

 tants, and the frozen tundras, inhabited only by hunters presents the most limited accomo- 

 dations for population in all the continent of the Old World. When once this limit was reached, 

 which happened as soon as the numerous Yakuts who occupied the laud drove the aborigenes 

 to the north-east into the polar tundra zone, these aborigenes ought to evince symptoms of 

 dying out, as the country in which they were congregated was not, with their means of pro- 

 curing food, capable of nourishing them. There is yet another argument in favour of the 

 Yakuts. The forest zone affords far greater capacity for population than the tundras, and 

 this capacity was considerably further increased when the Yakuts arrived, in virtue of the 

 difference of their state of culture from that of the former aborigenes of the country, as every 

 country has greater capacity for a race of cattle breeders than of hunters. The Yakuts, there- 

 fore, having driven out the natives into the polar tundra zone, had ample space in the 



