Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/84

Rh 68 E U S S I A [POPULATION OF tundras in the far north, their monotonous surfaces are diversified by only a few, and these for most part low, hilly tracts. Recently emerged from the Post-Pliocene sea, or cleared of their ice-sheet coverings, they preserve the very same features over immense stretches ; and the few portions that rise above the general elevation have more the character of broad and gentle swellings than of mountain-chains. Of this class are the swampy plateaus of the Kola peninsula, gently sloping southwards to the lake-regions of Finland and north-west Russia; the Valdai table-lands, where all the great rivers of Russia take their rise ; the broad and gently-sloping meridional belt of the Ural Mountains; and lastly, the Taimyr, Tunguska, and Verkhoyansk ridges in Siberia, which do not reach the snow-line, notwithstanding their sub-Arctic position. As to the picturesque Bureya mountains on the Amur, the forest-clothed Sikhota-alin on the Pacific, and the volcanic chains of Kamchatka, they belong to quite another orographical world; they are the border-ridges of the terraces by which the great plateau-belt descends to the depths of the Pacific Ocean. ivers. It is owing to these leading orographical features divined by Carl Ritter, but only within the present day revealed by geographical research that so many of the great rivers of the old continent are comprised within the limits of the Russian empire. Taking rise on the plateau- belt, or in its Alpine outskirts, they flow^first, like the upper Rhone and Rhine, along high longitudinal valleys formerly filled up with great lakes; next they find their way through the rocky walls ; and finally they enter the lowlands, where they become navigable, and, describing great curves to avoid here and there the minor plateaus and hilly tracts, they bring into water-communication with one another places thousands of miles apart. The double river-systems of the Volga and Kama, the Obi and Irtish, the Angara and Yenisei, the Lena and Vitim on the Arctic slope, the Amur and Sungari on the Pacific slope, are instances. They were the true channels of Russian colonization. A broad depression, the Aral-Caspian desert has arisen where the plateau-belt has reached its greatest height and suddenly changes its direction from a north- western into a north-eastern one; this desert is now filled only to a small extent by the salt waters of the Caspian, Aral, and Balkash inland seas ; but it bears unmistakable traces of having been during Post-Pliocene times an im- mense inland basin. There the Volga, the Ural, the Sir Daria, and the Oxus discharge their waters without reaching the ocean, but continue to bring life to the rapidly drying Transcaspian Steppes, or connect by their river network, as the Volga does, the most remote parts of European Russia, he ex- The above-described features of the physical geography msion of { fo e empire explain the relative uniformity of this wide territory, in conjunction with the variety of physical features on its outskirts. They explain also the rapidity of the expansion of Slavonic colonization over these thinly peopled regions; and they also throw light upon the internal cohesion of the empire, which cannot fail to strike the traveller as he crosses this immense territory, and finds everywhere the same dominating race, the same features of life. In fact, in their advance from the basins of the Volkhoff and Dnieper to the foot of the Altai and Sayan Mountains, that is, along nearly a quarter of the earth's circumference, the Russian colonizers could always find the same physical conditions, the same forests and prairies as they had left at home, the same facilities for agriculture, only modified somewhat by minor topographical features. New conditions of climate and soil, and consequently new cultures and civilizations, the Russians met with, in their expansion towards the south and east, only beyond the Caucasus, in the Aral-Caspian region, and in the basin of the Usuri on the Pacific coast. Favoured by these con- ditions, the Russians not only conquered northern Asia they colonized it. The total population of the Russian empire was stated Popula- at 102,000,000 by estimates made in 1878-82; but it is tion - multiplying rapidly, and, as the surplus of births over deaths reaches nearly 1,250,000 every year, it must now be somewhat more than 106 millions. Within the empire a very great diversity of nationalities is comprised, due to the amalgamation or absorption by the Slavonian race of a variety of Ural-Altaic stems, of Turco-Tartars, Turco-Mongolians, and various Caucasian stems. Statistics as to their relative strength are still very imperfect, and their ethnical relations have not as yet been completely determined ; but, considered broadly, they may be classified as follows : A. The Letto-Slavonians comprise (a) the Lithuanians and Letts on the lower Niemen and Diina, and (b) 'the Slavonians, that is, the Poles on the Vistula and Niemen and the Russians Great, Little, and White whose proper abodes are in European Russia, south of a line drawn from the Gulf of Finland to the middle Volga. Spreading from this region towards the north-east, east, and south-east, they have colonized north-east Russia, the Ural region, Caucasus, Siberia, and large parts of the Kirghiz Steppe, the leading feature of their colonization having always been penetration in compact masses among the original inhabitants. Thus, on northern Caucasus the Russians (chiefly Little Russians) already constitute a compact rural population of nearly 1,500,000, that is, about a quarter of the total population of Caucasia. In Western Siberia the Great Russians already number more than 2,300,000 agriculturists, constituting four- fifths of the entire population; in Eastern Siberia they number more than 1,000,000, that is, probably more than the original inhabitants ; and the Kirghiz Steppe has also begun rapidly to be colonized within the last twenty years. It is only in the more densely peopled Turkestan, and in the recently annexed Transcaspian region, that Russian settlers continue to bear but a small proportion to the natives (who are more than 4,600,000 strong). The Slavonians altogether number more than 75,000,000, of which number 5,600,000 are Poles. Swedes (310,000), Germans (1,240,000), Roumanians, Serbs, &c., may number altogether about 2,500,000. B. A great variety of populations belonging to the Caucasian race, but not yet well classified, some of which are considered to be remainders of formerly larger nation- alities pushed aside into the mountain tracts during their migrations, are met with on Caucasus. Such are the Georgians, Ossetes, Lesghians, who fall little short of 2,500,000, and the Armenians, about 1,000,000. C. The Iranian branch is represented by some 130,000 Persians and Kurds in Caucasia and Transcaucasia, and by Tajiks in Turkestan, mixed with Turco-Tartar Sarts. The nomad Tsigans, or Gipsies, numbering nearly 12,000, may be mentioned under this head. D. The Semitic branch consists of upwards of 3,000,000 Jews in Poland, in west and south-west Russia, and on Caucasus and in the towns of Central Asia, and of a few thousand Karaite Jews. E. The Ural-Altaic branch comprises two great sub- divisions the Finnish and the Turco-Tartarian stems, mixed to some extent with Mongolians. The former (see below) occupy, broadly speaking, a wide stretch of territory to the north of the Slavonians, from the Baltic to the Yenisei, and include the Baltic Finns, the Northern Finns, the Volga Finns, and the Ugrians. The Russians have already spread among the last two in compact masses,