menced
to-morrow by the Russian Government, but neither gold, not any other
mineral has yet been found so far north in anything like paying
quantities. Draw a straight line on the map from Verkhoyansk to Gijiga
and it will divide the southern (or productive) portion of Siberia from
the northern (and useless) wastes about three thousand miles in length,
which a Paris-New York railroad would have to cross.[89]

[Footnote 89: "Around the North Pole lies a broad belt of inhospitable
land, a desert which owes its special character rather to water than to
the sun. Towards the Pole this desert gradually loses itself in fields
of ice; towards the south in dwarfed woods, becoming itself a field of
snow and ice when the long winter sets in, while stunted trees struggle
for existence only in the deepest valleys or on the sunniest slopes.
This region is the tundra. Our language possesses no synonym for the
word tundra. Our fatherland possesses no such track of country, for the
tundra is neither heath nor moor, neither marsh nor fen, neither
highlands nor sand-dunes, neither moss nor morass, though in many places
it may resemble one or other of these. 'Moss Steppes' some one has
attempted to name it, but the expression is only satisfactory to those
who have grasped the idea of steppe in its widest sense."--_Brehm_.]

A so-called prospectus issued by a syndicate, inviting the public to
subscribe for a "preliminary survey" for a Franco-American line, came
under my notice the other day. Here is an extract:

"Ten years ago the name Siberia called up a picture of wastes of snow
and ice. To-day the same Siberia is a land filled with thriving
villages, producing grain and various vegetables; that great compeller
of civilisation, the railway, has broken down the bars between the world
and Siberia. Besides its countless resources of the soil, besides its
rivers filled with valuable fish, and its forests inhabited by
fur-bearing animals, Siberia is now beginning to show to the world its
resources of gold, iron, copper, manganese, quicksilver, platinum, and
coal, the yearly output of which is but a feeble index of what it will
be when the deposits are developed."

All this is very true regarding certain portions of Siberia. The Amur,
Altai, Yenesei, and even Yakutsk provinces. But although the writer
goes on to enlarge upon the boundless possibilities which would be
opened up by the construction of a railway from Europe to America, he
fail