1885.] Geography and Travels, 285 
GENERAL NOTES. 
GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVELS.' 
As1a.—Asiatic Notes—The peninsula of Kamtchatka is by the 
Russische Revue said to contain but 6500 people. „There is no 
agriculture, and for food they rely mainly on the fish, chiefly 
salmon which throng the rivers in summer, and are dried and 
stored for the winter. On account of the scarcity and dearness of 
salt the fish often decompose, and the people suffer great priva- 
tion. For clothes, utensils, tea, tobacco, they have to look abroad, 
and their imports, paid for in sable skins, are almost wholly from 
California. A chain of volcanic mountains, reaching 5000 feet in 
height, runs down the center of the peninsula, and through this 
the large navigable river Kamtchatka makes its way to the Pacific, 
M. Leon de Rosny, the Japanese scholar, insists that the Aino 
is one of the two chief factors in the present Japanese race. He 
believes the Aino element to be a large one, and bases his argu- 
ments on an examination of the cosmogony, which contains two 
separate and distinctly marked mythologies, one of which is 
transparently aboriginal. Thus the Japanese of to-day is, in his 
opinion, a mixture of the conquering yellow and the conquered 
white races. The celebrated French traveler, Charles Huber, 
who has, since 1879, been engaged in the exploration of the arch- 
zological remains of Central Arabia, was killed on July 30th, at 
Tafua by Bedouins of the tribe of Harb, while on his way from 
Hail to the Persian gulf. Steers and Calmeyer islands, the 
product of the Krakatoa eruption, have again sunk, as has also 
an island a mile east of Verlaten island. In 1868 a Russian 
surveying officer accidently discovered in the Altai mountains the 
settlements of some Russian sectaries who had migrated thither 
during the last century. Recently the governor-general of Irkutsk, 
in a progress through his province, came upon a town called 
Ilim, with four churches and 150 houses. The town was gov- 
erned by a vetche or public assembly, convoked by the ringing of 
a great bell, as at Novgorod the Great in its republican days. 
None of the inhabitants could read or write. The traveler Adri- 
archipelago south-west of Mindoro and north of Paluan. The 
three chief islands are Busuanga, Calamienes or Culion, and 
Linacapan, The natives of Culion are Tagbannas, an ancient 
people found also in Paluan; and probably spread formerly over a 
wider area. Some few are Christianized, but most are incepe 
dent, and are fetich-worshipers. In the island of Dibatac, hills 
surround a horseshoe-shaped plain with a depression in the cen- 
i This department is edited by W. N. Lockincron, Philadelphia, 
