the slaughtered animals; and offerings
of tobacco are always thrown to the evil spirits when the Koraks
cross the summit of a mountain. The bodies of the dead, among all the
wandering tribes, are burned, together with all their effects, in the
hope of a final resurrection of both spirit and matter; and the sick,
as soon as their recovery becomes hopeless, are either stoned to
death or speared. We found it to be true, as we had been told by the
Russians and the Kamchadals, that the Koraks murdered all their old
people as soon as sickness or the infirmities of age unfitted them
for the hardships of a nomadic life. Long experience has given them
a terrible familiarity with the best and quickest methods of taking
life; and they often explained to us with the most sickening
minuteness, as we sat at night in their smoky _pologs_, the different
ways in which a man could be killed, and pointed out the vital parts
of the body where a spear or knife thrust would prove most instantly
fatal. I thought of De Quincey's celebrated Essay upon "Murder
Considered as One of the Fine Arts," and of the field which a Korak
encampment would afford to his "Society of Connoisseurs in Murder."
All Koraks are taught to look upon such a death as the natural end of
their existence, and they meet it generally with perfect composure.
Instances are rare where a man desires to outlive the period of
his physical activity and usefulness. They are put to death in
the presence of the whole band, with elaborate but unintelligible
ceremonies; their bodies are then burned, and the ashes suffered to be
scattered and blown away by the wind.

These customs of murdering the old and sick, and burning the bodies of
the dead, grow naturally out of the wandering life which the Koraks
have adopted, and are only illustrations of the powerful influence
which physical laws exert everywhere upon the actions and moral
feelings of men. They both follow logically and almost inevitably from
the very nature of the country and climate. The barrenness of the soil
in north-eastern Siberia, and the severity of the long winter, led
man to domesticate the reindeer as the only means of obtaining
a subsistence; the domestication of the reindeer necessitated a
wandering life; a wandering life made sickness and infirmity unusually
burdensome to both sufferers and supporters; and this finally led to
the murder of the old and sick, as a measure both of policy and mercy.
The same causes g