1883.1 
37 
Analyses of Books . 
cent are hybrids of every stage between the two. He met with 
similar cases of hybridism in not a few other places. He found 
hybrid birds mated together, and producing eggs and young. 
The evidence of the fertility of these hybrids is thoroughly con- 
clusive. Surely nothing more will be needed to uproot the old 
superstition — we can give it no better name — of the universal 
sterility of half-breeds. Hybrids between the capercailzie and 
the black grouse appear also to exist. In Central Europe the 
male capercailzie has frequently been found mated with the female 
hazel grouse. 
In the Valley of the Yenesay Mr. Seebohm obtained two spe- 
cimens of Pallas’s house martin ( Hirundo lagopoda), a species 
nearly allied to the common house martin, which breeds in 
Eastern Siberia and appears to winter in Borneo. In England 
it is so rare that the British Museum did not possess a specimen. 
Mr. Seebohm’s opinion of the Russian character is not too 
flattering. He writes : — The Russian official is very impartial 
in the selection of his viffiims. He plunders the Government, 
he plunders the people, and he plunders his fellow-officials ; but 
his worst feature is that he helps the rich to plunder the poor. 
A merchant does not lose caste by doing a dishonourable acft. 
So far from feeling any sense of shame from having adted dis- 
honourably, he feels a sense of complacency. It gives a Russian 
far more innate pleasure to cheat somebody out of a rouble than 
to earn a rouble honestly. He feels that he has done a clever 
thing by earning a rouble dishonestly, and he despises the honest 
man as weak.'' 
But this general absence of truthfulness and honour our author 
accounts for not by considerations of race, but of government. 
Yet he seems to us to damage his own contention by admitting 
that the “ Turk never lies,” though labouring under a still worse, 
government than that of his northern neighbour. 
But Mr. Seebohm, though he tells the truth concerning Russia, 
is not blind to evils nearer home. He writes : — “ The unedu- 
cated Russian is a child, with a child’s virtues and a child’s faults. 
The uneducated Englishman is a brute, a savage, with nothing 
of the child about him.” 
In his Preface the author speaks of Siberia as “ a magnificent 
country of superb forests and corn-fields, capable of rivalling 
those of Minnesota, whilst its mineral wealth includes iron equal 
in quality to that of Sweden, and gold almost as abundant as 
that of California, to say nothing of copper, salt, and coal, 
Siberia is in facft a second Canada in reserve, and the political 
geographer — looking into the far future, and wondering what is 
to become of the surplus population and capital of the English 
and Teutonic races when North America shall be as thickly po- 
pulated as Europe — may postpone his anxiety for many centuries 
to allow time for the civilisation of Siberia to re-open the 
problem.” 
