38 TKAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



prejudicial to the long continuance of the Lapp race, 

 which, already now dwindling, will, it is feared, before 

 many years have rolled on, be a thing of the past. 

 Another reason favouring the supposition that the 

 Lapps are doomed to early extinction the usual 

 fate of nomads, or those who try to stem the great 

 tide of civilisation is, that the Quaens, or natives of 

 Eussian Finland, are now already supplanting them 

 everywhere. The Queens, who mainly compose the 

 population of the towns on the east and north coasts 

 of Norway, are hard-working and more intelligent, 

 and also much better adapted for the higher branches 

 of manual labour than their Lapp neighbours, who 

 never will, and never can, be anything else than 

 nomads. By no means unconnected with the de- 

 cline of the race, is the failure, or rather difficulty, 

 of obtaining sufficient reindeer - moss during the 

 winter (Lapp and reindeer are so identified that it 

 is impossible to separate the two). Formerly the 

 deer were marched into Eussian territory, and there 

 suffered to feed at will ; but the Eussian nomads, 

 thinking their rights violated, obtained a law for- 

 bidding the crossing of the frontier, under pain of 

 destruction of the herds transgressing. And one of 

 the first results of this was, that a sort of reign of 

 terror was established on the frontier, with mutual 

 recrimination and slaughtering of herds. One poor 

 Norsk Lapp had strayed inside the frontier a few 

 hundred yards, and was then surprised and forced to 



