Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/78

56 United States," for New Jersey, he would have to increase the width of his page to fifty-six feet. If he should delineate Siberia upon the scale of the British ordnance survey maps of England (the "six-шnch maps") he would be compelled to provide himself with a sheet of paper 2100 feet wide, and his atlas, if laid out open, would cover the whole lower part of New York City from the Battery to Wall street. These illustrations are sufficient to show that if Siberia were charted upon a scale corresponding with that employed in mapping other countries, its enormous geographical extent would be much more readily apprehended, and would appeal much more strongly to the imagination.

Siberia extends in its extreme dimensions from latitude 40.17 (the southern boundary of Semiréchinsk) to latitude 77.46 (Cape Cheliúskin), and from longitude 60 east (the Uráls) to longitude 190 west (Bering strait). It therefore has an extreme range of about 37 degrees, or 2500 miles, in latitude, and 130 degrees, or 5000 miles, in longitude. Even these bare statistics give one an impression of vast geographical extent; but their significance may be emphasized by means of a simple illustration. If it were possible to move entire countries from one part of the globe to another, you could take the whole United States of America from Maine to California and from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico, and set it down in the middle of Siberia, without touching anywhere the boundaries of the latter territory. You could then take Alaska and all the States of Europe, with the single exception of Russia, and fit them into the remaining margin like the pieces of a dissected map; and after having thus accommodated all of the United States, including Alaska, and all of Europe, except Russia, you would still have more than 300,000 square miles of Siberian territory to spare—or, in other words, you would still leave unoccupied in Siberia an area half as large again as