V.-NORTHERN RUSSIA. 



THE routes to St. Petersburg from Britain are numerous. During the 

 summer season there is scarcely a day in the week excepting Sunday 

 on which a steamer is not leaving some British port for St. Petersburg 

 in times of settled peace, and the voyage is always made within the 

 week ; and by railway and steamer it may be reached in less time by 

 Ostend, Antwerp, or Rotterdam and Cologne, by Hamburg and Berlin, 

 or by the route through Sweden and Finland. 



A simple division of Kussia into well-defined regions has been 

 adopted or devised by Mackenzie Wallace, and in accordance with this 

 he has prefixed to the second volume of his work on Eussia a map of 

 Russia in Europe, in which he represents what he calls the Forest 

 Zone as extending in width from the whole breadth of Finland, 

 and following to some extent the 60 parallel of latitude, the latitude 

 of St. Petersburg, to the Ural Mountains, and bounded on the north 

 by Lapland, the North Sea, and the country of the Samoyedes. To 

 the south of it is the northern agricultural zone, extending from the 

 Baltic, Prussia, and Poland, to and a little beyond the Ural 

 Mountains, contracting considerably in breadth and stretching more 

 northwards in its eastern half. To the south of this is the southern 

 agricultural zone, or black earth zone, beyond which is the steppe 

 zone; and beyond this to the south-east is the pastoral region, to the 

 north of the Caspian, the whole spreading in a fan-like figure as 

 from a pivot in the latitude of 55 Q N. in Asiatic Russia. 



In these different regions of the extensive Empire of Russia, com- 

 pared with which the whole of Western Europe may seem like a 

 province, may be studied in operation all the varied methods of ex- 

 ploitation from their first development to their most advanced form. 

 Eoeden, as it is called in Finland, the Kumari of India, the Sartage 

 of France, is also to be met with in the north, but this can scarcely 

 with propriety be designated forest exploitation. But there we find 

 dominant the primitive form of forest exploitation, that known in 

 France sometimes as Furetage, but more generally as Jardinage, a 

 mode of exploitation followed in several British colonies, and entail- 

 ing upon them, I fear, most disastrous consequences. 



