aracter of the Siberian Koraks, and the origin and
nature of their religious belief, that I cannot do better than quote
his words:--

"Terror is everywhere the beginning of religion. The phenomena which
impress themselves most forcibly on the mind of the savage are not
those which enter manifestly into the sequence of natural laws, and
which are productive of most beneficial effects; but those which are
disastrous and apparently abnormal. Gratitude is less vivid than
fear, and the smallest infraction of a natural law produces a deeper
impression than the most sublime of its ordinary operations. When,
therefore, the most startling and terrible aspects of Nature are
presented to his mind--when the more deadly forms of disease or
natural convulsion desolate his land, the savage derives from them an
intensely realised perception of diabolical presence. In the darkness
of the night; amid the yawning chasms and the wild echoes of the
mountain gorge; under the blaze of the comet or the solemn gloom of
the eclipse; when famine has blasted the land; when the earthquake
and the pestilence have slaughtered their thousands; in every form
of disease which refracts and distorts the reason, in all that is
strange, portentous, and deadly, he feels and cowers before the
supernatural. Completely exposed to all the influences of Nature, and
completely ignorant of the chain of sequence that unites its various
parts, he lives in continual dread of what he deems the direct and
isolated acts of evil spirits. Feeling them continually near him, he
will naturally endeavour to enter into communion with them. He will
strive to propitiate them with gifts. If some great calamity has
fallen upon him, or if some vengeful passion has mastered his reason,
he will attempt to invest himself with their authority, and his
excited imagination will soon persuade him that he has succeeded in
his desire."

These pregnant words are the key to the religion of the Siberian
natives, and afford the only intelligible explanation of the origin of
shamans. If any proof were needed that this system of religion is the
natural outgrowth of human nature in certain conditions of barbarism,
it would be furnished by the universal prevalence of Shamanism in
north-eastern Siberia among so many diverse tribes of different
character and different origin. The tribe of Tunguses for instance,
is certainly of Chinese descent, and the tribe of Yakuts is certainly
Turkish. Both came