ersally the Greco-Russian faith and
receive Christian names. They acknowledge also their subjection to
the authority of the Tsar, and pay a regular annual tribute in furs.
Nearly all the Siberian squirrelskins which reach the European market
are bought by Russian traders from Wandering Tunguses around the
Okhotsk Sea. When I left the settlement of Okhotsk, in the fall of
1867, there were more than seventy thousand squirrelskins there in the
hands of one Russian merchant, and this was only a small part of the
whole number caught by the Tunguses during that summer. The Lamutkis,
who are first cousins to the Tunguses, are fewer in number, but live
in precisely the same way. I never met more than three or four
bands during two years of almost constant travel in all parts of
north-eastern Siberia.

The third great class of natives is the Turkish. It comprises only the
Yakuts (yah-koots') who are settled chiefly along the Lena River from
its head-waters to the Arctic Ocean. Their origin is unknown, but
their language is said to resemble the Turkish or modern Osmanli so
closely that a Constantinopolitan of the lower class could converse
fairly well with a Yakut from the Lena. I regret that I was not enough
interested in comparative philology while in Siberia to compile
a vocabulary and grammar of the Yakut language. I had excellent
opportunities for doing so, but was not aware at that time of its
close resemblance to the Turkish, and looked upon it only as
an unintelligible jargon which proved nothing but the active
participation of the Yakuts in the construction of the Tower of Babel.
The bulk of this tribe is settled immediately around the Asiatic pole
of cold, and they can unquestionably endure a lower temperature with
less suffering than any other natives in Siberia. They are called by
the Russian explorer Wrangell, "iron men," and well do they deserve
the appellation. The thermometer at Yakutsk, where several thousands
of them are settled, _averages_ during the three winter months
thirty-seven degrees below zero; but this intense cold does not seem
to occasion them the slightest inconvenience. I have seen them in a
temperature of -40 deg., clad only in a shirt and one sheepskin coat,
standing quietly in the street, talking and laughing as if it were a
pleasant summer's day and they were enjoying the balmy air! They are
the most thrifty, industrious natives in all northern Asia. It is a
proverbial saying in Siberia, that