w no letter."

Giles Fletcher, who in 1588 was Queen Elizabeth's ambassador to the
Czar, writes in his account of Russia of the Samoyeds in the
following way:--[58]

"The _Samoyt_ hath his name (as the _Russe_ saith) of
eating himselfe: as if in times past they lived as the
_Cannibals_, eating one another. Which they make more
probable, because at this time they eate all kind of raw
flesh, whatsoeuer it bee, euen the very carrion that lyeth
in the ditch. But as the _Samoits_ themselves will say,
they were called _Samoie_, that is, _of themselves_, as
though they were _Indigenae_, or people bred upon that
very soyle that never changed their seate from one place
to another, as most Nations have done. They are clad in
Seale-skinnes, with the hayrie side outwards downe as low
as the knees, with their Breeches and Netherstocks of the
same, both men and women. They are all Blacke hayred,
naturally beardless. And therefore the Men are hardly
discerned from the Women by their lookes: saue that the
Women weare a locke of hayre down along both their eares."

In nearly the same way the Samoyeds are described by G. DE VEER in
his account of Barents' second voyage in 1595. Barents got good
information from the Samoyeds as to the navigable water to the
eastward, and always stood on a good footing with them, excepting on
one occasion when the Samoyeds went down to the Dutchmen's boats and
took back an idol which had been carried off from a large
sacrificial mound.

[Illustration: SAMOYEDS. From Schleissing's Neu-entdecktes Sieweria,
worinnen die Zobeln gefangen werden. Zittau 1693.[59] ]

The Samoyeds have since formed the subject of a very extensive
literature, of which however it is impossible for me to give any
account here. Among other points their relations to other races have
been much discussed. On this subject I have received from my learned
friend, the renowned philologist Professor AHLQUIST of Helsingfors
the following communication:--

The Samoyeds are reckoned, along with the Tungoose, the
Mongolian, the Turkish and the Finnish-Ugrian races, to
belong to the so-called Altaic or Ural-Altaic stem. What
is mainly characteristic of this stem, is that all the
languages occurring within it belong to the so-called
agglutinating type. For in these languages the relations
of ideas are expressed exclusively by terminations or
s