336 THE RUSSIAN CENSUS OF 1897 



inhabitants per square mile; the Caucasus, 53.7, and European 

 Russia, 50.6. Siberia contains only one person to each square 

 mile, and the Steppes eight persons. 



Mr John Karel, Consul-General of the United States at St Pe- 

 tersburg-, points out the peculiar distribution of the population 

 of European Russia. He says : 



The distribution of the 94,000,000 inhabitants in European Russia de- 

 pends principally upon the natural and economic conditions of the plain 

 of liussia, which is cut diagonally from Podolia and Bessarabia to the 

 government of Viatka by the chernoziom (black earth) region. This 

 region comprises less than 658,740 square miles, but if the non-chernoziora 

 governments, in which is included the Moscow industrial district, be 

 added thereto, it contains moi'e than 746,572 square miles, i. e., two-fifths 

 of the whole plain of European Russia, which, according to the census, 

 is inhabited by 63,000,000 people, or by two-thirds of the whole popula- 

 tion of European Russia. 



The most compact population is centered on the narrow strip formed 

 by the governments of Podolia, the chernoziom part of Volyn, the larger 

 part of Kiev and Poltava, the chernoziom part of Chernigov, the non- 

 steppe chernoziom parts of Kharkov and Voronezsh, and the chernoziom 

 parts of Orel, Tambov, Riazan, and Tula. 



The present tendency of population to drift to the cities, less 

 marked in Russia than in Europe generally, is shown by the fact 

 that there are no fe^ver than 123 cities in which the population 

 exceeds 25,000. The 20 most populous cities are as follows : St 

 Petersburg, 1,267,023; Moscow, 988,610; Warsaw, 614,752; Odes- 

 sa, 404,651 ; Lodz, 314,780 ; Riga, 282,943 ; Kiev, 248,750; Khar- 

 kov, 170,682 ; Tiflis, 159,862 ; Vilna, 159,568 ; Tashkent, 156,506 ; 

 Saratov, 133,116 ; Kazan, 131,508; Ekaterinoslav, 121,216; Ros- 

 toff-on-Don, 119,889; Astrakhan, 113,075 ; Baku, 112,253; Tula, 

 111,048 ; Kishinev, 108,506 ; Nijni-Novgorod, 98,503. 



A. W. G. 



The surprisingly early availability of the Russian census returns is due 

 to the employment of the Hollerith tabulating machine, first used for 

 census purposes by the United States government in 1890. 



Out of 2,403,750 Germans who left their native land between 1871 and 

 1896 about 96 per cent emigrated to the United States. Failing to divert 

 the tide of emigration toward the German colonies in Africa, the govern- 

 ment is now seeking to direct it toward certain parts of South America, 

 in preference to the United States, whei-e the peculiarities, language, and 

 customs of the Germans are lost by assimilation and emigrants become 

 competitors with the artisans and agriculturists of the mother country. 



