diverse physical conditions are found—fertile plains of black earth, boundless grazing steppes, rolling downs, rugged plateaus, gloomy forests and frozen toundras. Here it is proposed to give an account, from an economic standpoint, of only one-third of this great territory, which includes the four main provinces of Western and Central Siberia. These districts, which, as has been said, comprise the parts of Siberia nearest to Europe, are of chief importance from the economic point of view, for here the wave of Slavonic immigration in its eastward course first impinged, and here European commercial influence is most widespread and most deeply rooted.
Geographically, the Ural Mountains, which are a range of rocky downs averaging about 1500 feet in altitude, are the natural barriers between the low plains of East European Russia and those of Western Siberia. The plains of Western Siberia stretch across the continent for nearly 1200 miles, without a break to the Altai Mountains, in the plateaus of which the great rivers of Western and Central Siberia take their rise. The Altai system itself consists of a complex mass of mountains, snowy ridges and plateau valleys which together form the north-west edge of the great Central Asiatic tableland. The edge of this tableland crosses Siberia from south-west to north-east, and presents its most rugged aspects in its south-western extremity, where, in the Siberian Altai system, mountains of 15,000 feet are met with. But as this tableland crosses the continent in a north-easterly direction the mountain masses become less complex and lower in altitude, till they finally sink in rolling downs to the sea-level in the north-eastern territories of Siberia. The provinces of
