querors of Siberia were fully as bold and persevering as the companions of Cortez and Pizarro, they also equalled them in avarice and cruelty. Under their iron yoke whole nations, such as the Schelagi, Aniujili, and Omoki, melted away; others, as the Woguls, Jukahires, Koriaks, and Itälmenes, were reduced to a scanty remnant.

The history of the subjugation of the Itälmenes, or natives of Kamchatka, as described by Steller, may suffice to show how the Cossacks made and how they abused their conquests.

When Atlassoff, with only sixteen men, came to the river of Kamchatka, the Itälmene chieftain inquired, through a Koriak interpreter, what they wanted, and whence they came; and received for answer that the powerful sovereign, to whom the whole land belonged, had sent them to levy the tribute which they owed him as his subjects. The chieftain was naturally astonished at this information, and offering the strangers a present of costly furs, he requested them to leave the country, and not to repeat their visit. But the Cossacks thought proper to remain, and built a small wooden fort, Verchnei Ostrog, whence they fell on the neighboring villages, robbing or destroying all they could lay hands upon. Exasperated by these acts, the Itälmenes resolved to attack the fort; but as the wary Cossacks had kept up a friendly intercourse with some of them, and had moreover ingratiated themselves with the women, the plans of their enemies were always revealed to them in proper time, and led to a still greater tyranny. At length the savages appeared before the ostrog in such overwhelming numbers that the Cossacks began to lose courage;

yet by their superior tactics they finally managed to gain a complete victory, and those who escaped their bullets were either drowned or taken prisoners,, and then put to death in the most cruel manner.

Convinced that a lasting security was impossible as long as the natives retained their numbers, the Cossacks lost no opportunity of goading them to revolt, and then butchering as many of them as they could. Thus, in less than forty years, the Kamchatkans were reduced to a twelfth part of their original numbers; and the Cossacks, having made a solitude, called it peace.

In former times the nomads of the North used freely to wander with their reindeer herds over the tundra, but after the conquest they were loaded with taxes, and confined to certain districts. The consequence was that their reindeer gradually perished, and that a great number of wandering herdsmen were now compelled to adopt a fisherman's life—a change fatal to many.

It would, however, be unjust to accuse the Russian Government of having willfully sought the ruin of the aboriginal tribes; on the contrary, it has constantly endeavored to protect them against the exactions of the Cossacks, and in order to secure their existence, has even granted them the exclusive possession of the districts assigned to them. Thus the Ostiaks and Samoïedes, the Koriaks and the Jakuts, have their own land, their own rivers, forests, and tundri. But if it is a common saying in European Russia "that heaven is high, and the Czar distant," it may easily be imagined that beyond the Ural the weak indigenous tribes found the law but a very inefficient barrier against the rapacity of their conquerors.

Thus, in spite of the Government, the jassak was not unfrequently raised, under various pretenses, to six or ten times its original amount; and the natives were, besides, obliged to bring the best of their produce, from considerable distances, to the ostrog.

Nor could the Government prevent the accumulation of usurious debts, nor the leasing of the best pasturages or fishing-stations for a trifling sum quite out. of proportion to their value; so that the natives no longer had the means of feeding their herds, and sank deeper and deeper into poverty."

And if we consider, finally, of what elements Yermak's band was originally composed, we can easily conceive that, under such masters, the lot of the Siberian natives was by no means to be envied.

The year 1734 opens a new epoch in the history of Siberian discoveries. Until then they had been merely undertaken for purposes of traffic; bold Cossacks and Promyschlenniki (or fur-hunters) had gradually extended their excursions to the Sea of Bering; but now, for the first time, scientific expeditions were sent out, for the more accurate investigation of the northern coasts of Siberia.

Prontschischtschew, who sailed westward from the Lena to circumnavigate. the icy capes of Taimurland, was accompanied by his youthful wife, who wintered with him at the Olenek, in 72° 54' of latitude, and in the following summer took part in his fruitless endeavors to double those most northerly points of Asia. He died in consequence of the fatigues he had to undergo, and a few days after she followed him to the grave. A similar example of female devotion is not to be met with in the annals of Arctic discovery.

After Prontschischtschew's death, Lieutenant Chariton Laptew was appointed to carry out the project in which the former had failed. Having been repulsed by the drift-ice, he was obliged to winter on the Chatanga (1739-40); but renewed the attempt in the following summer, which however exposed him to still severer trials. The vessel was wrecked in the ice; the crew reached the shore with difficulty, and many of them perished from fatigue and famine before the rivers were sufficiently frozen to enable the feeble survivors to return to their former winter-station at Chatanga. Notwithstanding the hardships which he and his party had endured, Laptew prosecuted the survey of the promontory in the following spring.

Setting out with a sledge-party across the Tundra on April 24, 1741, he reached Taimur Lake on the 30th; and following the Taimur River, as it flows from the lake, ascertained its mouth to be situated in lat. 75° 36′ N. On August 29 he safely returned to Jeniseisk, after one of the most difficult voyages ever performed by man. The resolution with which he overcame difficulties, and his perseverance amid the severest distresses, entitle him to a high rank among Arctic discoverers.

While Chariton Laptew was thus gaining distinction in the wilds of Taimurland, his brother, Dimitri Laptew, was busy extending geographical knowledge to the east of the Lena. He doubled the Sviatoi-noss, wintered on the banks of the Indigirka, surveyed the Bear Islands, passed a second winter on the borders of the Kolyma, and in a fourth season extended his survey of the coast to the Baranow Rock, which he vainly endeavored to double during two successive summers. After having passed seven years on the coasts of the Polar Ocean, he returned to Jakutsk in 1743.

Fourteen years later, Schalaurow, a merchant of Jakutsk, who sailed from. the Jana in a vessel built at his own expense, at length succeeded in doubling the Baranow Rock, and proceeded eastward as far as Cape Schelagskoi, which prevented his farther progress. After twice wintering on the dreary Kolyma, he resolved, with admirable perseverance, to make a third attempt, but his crew would no longer follow him. From a second sea-journey, which he undertook in 1764 to that cape, he did not return. "His unfortunate death is the more to be lamented," says Wrangell," as he sacrificed his property and life to a disinterested aim, and united intelligence and energy in a remarkable degree." On his map, the whole coast from the Jana to Cape Schelagskoi is marked, with an accuracy which does him the greatest honor. In 1785 Billings and Sarytchew were equally unsuccessful in the endeavor to sail round the cape which had defeated all Schalaurow's endeavors; nor has the voyage been accomplished to the present day.

As the sable had gradually led the Russian fur-hunters to Kamchatka, so the still more valuable sea-otter gave the chief impulse to the discovery of the Aleutic chain and the opposite continent of America. When Atlassow and his band arrived at Kamchatka by the end of the seventeenth century, they found the sea-otter abounding on its coasts; but the fur-hunters chased it so eagerly that, before the middle of the eighteenth century, they had entirely extirpated it in that country. On Bering's second voyage of discovery (1741-42), it was again found in considerable numbers. Tschirigow is said. to have brought back 900 skins, and on Bering's Island 700 sea - otterswhose skins, according to present prices, would be worth about £20,000—were killed almost without trouble. These facts, of course, encouraged the merchants of Jakutsk and Irkutsk to undertake new expeditions.

KAMCHATKA SABLES.

Generally, several of them formed an association, which fitted out some hardly seaworthy vessel at Ochotsk, where also the captain and the crew, consisting of fur-hunters and other adventurers, were hired. The expenses of such an expedition amounted to the considerable sum of about 30,000 roubles, as pack-horses had to transport a great part of the necessary outfit all the distance from Jakutsk, and the vessel generally remained four or five years on the voyage. Passing through one of the Kurile Straits, these expeditions sailed at first along the east coast of Kamchatka, bartering sables and sea-otters for reindeer skins and other articles; and as the precious furs became more rare, ventured out farther into the Eastern Ocean. Thus Michael Nowodsikoff discovered the Western Aleuts in 1745; Paikoff the Fox Islands in 1759; Adrian Tolstych almost all the islands of the central group, which still bear his name, in 1760;

Stephen Glottoff the island of Kadiak in 1763, and Krenitzin the peninsula of Aljaska in 1768. When we consider the scanty resources of these Russian navigators, the bad condition of their miserable barks, their own imperfect nautical knowledge, and the inhospitable nature of the seas which they traversed, we can not but admire their intrepidity.

In the Polar Sea there are neither sables nor otters, and thus the islands lying to the north of Siberia might have remained unknown till the present day, if the search after mammoth-teeth had not, in a similar manner, led to their discovery.

In March, 1770, while a merchant of the name of Lächow was busy collecting fossil ivory about Cape Sviatoinoss, he saw a large herd of deer coming over the ice from the north. Resolute and courageous, he at once resolved to follow their tracks, and after a sledge-journey of seventy versts, he came to an island, and twenty versts farther reached a second island, at which, owing to the roughness of the ice, his excursion terminated. He saw enough, however, of the richness of the two islands in mammoth-teeth, to show him that another visit would be a valuable speculation; and on making his report to the Russian Government, he obtained an exclusive privilege to dig for mammoth-bones on the islands which he had discovered, and to which his name had been given. In the summer of 1773 he consequently returned, and ascertained the existence of a third island, much larger than the others, mountainous, and having its coasts covered with drift-wood. He then went back to the first island, wintered there, and returned to Ustjansk in spring with a valuable cargo of mammoth-tusks.

There hardly exists a more remarkable article of commerce than these remains of an extinct animal. In North Siberia, along the Obi, the Jenissei, the Lena, and their tributaries, from lat. 58° to 70°, or along the shores of the Polar Ocean as far as the American side of Bering Strait, the remains of a species of elephant are found imbedded in the frozen soil, or become exposed, by the annual thawing and crumbling of the river-banks. Dozens of tusks are frequently found together, but the most astonishing deposit of mammoth-bones occurs in the Lächow Islands, where, in some localities, they are accumulated in such quantities as to form the chief substance of the soil. Year after year the tuskhunters work every summer at the cliffs, without producing any sensible diminution of the stock. The solidly-frozen matrix in which the bones lie thaws to a certain extent annually, allowing the tusks to drop out or to be quarried. In 1821, 20,000 lbs. of the fossil ivory were procured from the island of New Siberia.

The ice in which the mammoth remains are imbedded sometimes preserves their entire bodies, in spite of the countless ages which must have elapsed since they walked on earth. In 1799 the carcass of a mammoth was discovered so fresh that the dogs ate the flesh for two summers. The skeleton is preserved at St. Petersburg, and specimens of the woolly hair-proving that the climate of Siberia, though then no doubt much milder than at present, still required the protection of a warm and shaggy coat-were presented to the chief museums of Europe.

The remains of a rhinoceros, very similar to the Indian species, are likewise