X IN-TRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 



On still broader grounds, it is to be hoped that this work will 

 meet with American success, that it may be an entering wedge to 

 that valuable literature of geographical research and exploration, 

 which from incompatibility of language and other causes has never 

 been fully or even comprehensively opened to English speaking 

 people. It has been well said by one who has opportunities to 

 fairly judge that "it has been known by scientists for some time 

 that more valuable investigation was buried from sight in the 

 Russian language than in any or all others. Few can imagine 

 what activity in geographical, statistical, astronomical, and other 

 research has gone on in the empire of the Czar. It is predicted 

 that within ten years more students will take up the Russian 

 language than those of other nations of Eastern Europe, simply as 

 a necessity. This youngest family of the Aryans is moving west- 

 ward with its ideas and literature, as well as its population and 

 empire. There are no better explorers and no better recorders 

 of investigations." It is undoubtedly a field in which Americans 

 can reap a rich reward of geographical investigation. There is 

 an idea among some, and even friends of Russia, that their trav- 

 elers and explorers have not done themselves justice in recording 

 their doings, but this in the broad sense is not true. Rather they 

 have been poor chroniclers for the public ; but their official reports, 

 hidden away in government archives, are rich in their thorough 

 investigations, oftentimes more nearly perfect and complete than 

 the equivalents in our own language, where it takes no long argu- 

 ment to prove that great attention given to the public and popular 

 account, has been at the expense of the similar qualities in the 

 official report; while many expeditions, American and British, have 

 not been under official patronage at all, which has seldom been the 

 case with Russian research. As already noted, the bulk of similar 

 volumes from other languages and other archives into the English 

 has come from Great Britain ; but probably from the unfortunate 

 bitter antagonism between the two countries which has created 

 an apathy in one and a suspicion in the other that they will not 

 be judged in an unprejudiced way, Russia has not got a fair share 

 of what she has really accomplished geographically translated into 



