108 
THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY. 
is about 5,000,000 square miles, in other words it is some forty times 
larger than the United Kingdom. Divided from Russia in Europe by 
the low range of hills called the Ural Mountains, a fact which strikes 
the imagination is, that one can travel from the Baltic to the Pacific 
without quitting the boundaries of the Russian Empire. 
But whereas the size of Siberia is so vast, the population still only 
amounts to about 10,000,000 inhabitants, scattered over the land, so 
that nowhere is it dense, while, in most places, it is extremely sparse. 
The country, on the whole, is flat rather than hilly, and one can best 
picture it in winter as being an almost boundless sheet of snow and ice. 
The towns are few and far between, in the sense in which we know 
them, the largest being Irkutsk, situated in the heart of Siberia, with 
a population of some 60,000 souls ; on the other hand many contain 
only 2,000 people. 
Speaking generally, the new-comers have pressed continually east¬ 
wards. A Russian village consists of one long street with a single row 
of cottages on either side, and the immigration into Siberia may be said, 
so far, to have followed the same lines, nor is this unnatural: find¬ 
ing no fresh physical obstacles to progress towards the east, new comers 
mostly went thither, instead of meeting with, perhaps, still greater 
hardships by striking off to the north or to the south. 
With very few exceptions the houses are built of wood, and as the 
interstices between the planks are carefully filled up, it is not difficult 
by the aid of good stoves, to maintain a sufficiently high temperature 
during the cold months of the year. In summer time the weather is 
mostly warm and agreeable except, of course, towards the regions in 
the far north. 
The capabilities of the soil are quite astonishing. In the west 
especially, the grain growing area is not only immense but it is also 
very fertile. When the snow has melted, some five milliards of acres 
are capable of producing almost every description of cereal, vegetable, 
fruit or plant. Even in those more easterly regions, where the ground is 
always frozen except for a few inches below the surface, the fertility 
of the ground is something remarkable, the wild vine flourishing well 
and producing wine of a quite drinkable quality. The sources of wealth 
already mentioned would be, of themselves, sufficient to give commer¬ 
cial importance to a country, but there are others which far surpass 
them in value. It is not, I venture to think, practicable to give even 
a slight but accurate sketch of Siberia without employing words which 
give the idea of immensity. Siberia is immense in many ways already 
and will unquestionably become greater as time goes on. Apart, then, 
from the potential wealth to be produced by the soil, there are other 
sources buried in it. These are the mineral riches, of which nearly, if 
not every kind, is known to exist in enormous quantities. The beds of 
coal are so huge that even in those regions where it has been proved 
to exist, nothing like an accurate computation of their area has yet 
been made, and it may here be mentioned that the forests are so im¬ 
mense, both with regard to their extent and the size of their trees, that, 
with a fair system of afforestation, they can supply any quantity of fuel 
