Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/48

 36 Pacific, its chief river being the Amur, a stream of great importance for colonization.

Being surrounded by mountains keeping off the hot winds from the south, and being open to the northern winds, Siberia has a cold and continental climate in which the windows break with the cold, the milk is sold in pieces, the people become blind from the glittering snows, and one's breath becomes frozen. The ground, except for the surface, remains always frozen in the northern part of Siberia. As at a certain distance from the surface the ground keeps the average temperature of the year, and as all over Siberia the average temperature is below 0°, the ground remains frozen for the whole year, notwithstanding certain seasonal differences in climate. When a well was dug in Yakutsk as deep as 380 feet below the ground the temperature was below 0°. In this eternal ice the bodies of diluvial animals, mammoths, etc., long ago extinct, have been found preserved, with bones, flesh, and hair.

Eastern Siberia is cooler than Western, except for the immediate polar regions, but the greater change of climate regulating the botanical and zoological conditions is to be observed from north to south. These differences from north to south are the ones with, which we shall be concerned. We shall roughly divide the whole of this vast region into two climatic areas:

A. The Northern area with the truly Arctic climate,

and

B. The Southern or Sub-Arctic area.

It would be difficult to draw a line between them, but the Northern area would certainly descend more south in the east than in the west.

The flat and low-lying Northern area facing the neighbouring archipelago of New Siberia and the more distant Wrangel Land form a true Arctic region, lying entirely