THE FORESTS AND SPORT OF SIBERIA. 127 



vigorous, and the general composition of the wood changes; the 

 undergrowth, which is luxuriant everywhere, becomes diversified in 

 the most unexpected manner. Gladly one welcomes each new species 

 of tree or bush which reduces the marked poverty of species in 

 these forests, but even from the richest tracts many trees are awant- 

 ing which we rarely miss in Europe at the same latitude. It must 

 be confessed that the forests of Siberia are uniform and monotonous, 

 like the steppes, and like the tundra. 



In the river- valleys of the forest zone the uniformity is perhaps 

 most conspicuous. Here the willows predominate, forming often 

 extensive woods by the banks and on the islands, almost to the com- 

 plete exclusion of other trees. Over wide stretches willows alone 

 form the woods of the valley, and in many places the trees rise to a 

 stately height, yet even then without often gaining in impressive- 

 ness or charm. For the isolated willow-tree is not more, but rather 

 less picturesque than the willow bushes; its crown is always thin 

 and irregular, it is not close-set but loose and open, in fact almost 

 scraggy. On frequent repetition it becomes wearisome. When the 

 willows stand, as is usual, close beside one another, they form a 

 dense thicket, and then, even more than the isolated tree, they lack 

 character, for all the stems rise like posts and all the crowns fuse 

 into a close, straight-contoured mass of foliage, suggestive of a 

 clipped hedge, in which the individual trees are entirely merged. As 

 pleasing additions to such monotonous woods we welcome the sprink- 

 ling of poplars, the silver poplar in the south, the aspen in the north, 

 both of them giving some animation to the willows. In the valley 

 of the stream too, but only in those places which are not subject 

 to regularly-recurring floods, the birch appears in addition to the 

 trees already noticed; indeed birch-covered tracts occur with some 

 constancy as connecting links between the willow- woods and the 

 pine-forests. But it is only in the south of the zone that the birch 

 attains its full size and vigour; it is as unresisting a victim to the 

 flames as the most resinous pine, and is therefore incapable of greatly 

 affecting the general aspect of the forest. More or less unmixed birch 

 woods bound the forest zone to the south, and sometimes intrude 

 far into the steppes, yet it is but rarely that they form thick, com- 



