winter that even he manages to catch an archar. [Illustration: Fig. 17.--Pallas’s Sand-grouse (_Syrrhaptes paradoxus_).] As on the mountains, so on the driest, dreariest stretches of the steppes, which even in spring suggest African deserts, there are characteristic animals. In such places almost all the plants of the highlands and valleys disappear except the low tufted grass and diminutive bushes of wormwood. Here, however, grows a remarkable shrub which one does not see elsewhere, a shrub called _ramwood_ on account of its extreme hardness and toughness, which baffles the axe. It roots on those rare spots in the wilderness where the rain-storms have washed together some poor red clay. There it sometimes grows into bushwork of considerable extent, affording shelter and shade to other plants, so that these green spots come to look like little oases in the desert. But these oases are no more lively than the dreary steppes around, for apart from a shrike, the white-throat, and a wood-wren, one sees no bird, and still less any mammal. On the other hand, amid the desolation there live some of the most notable of the steppe animals, along with others which occur everywhere; besides the short-toed lark and calandra lark there is the coal-black Tartar lark, which those aware of the general colour-resemblance between ground-birds and the ground would naturally look for on the black earth. Along with the small plover there is the gregarious lapwing, along with the great bustard the slender ruffed bustard, which the Kirghiz call the ambler, along with the sand-grouse there is Pallas’s sand-grouse or steppe-grouse.[24] It was this last bird which some years ago migrated in large numbers into Germany and settled on the dunes and sandy places, but was so inhospitably received by us, so ruthlessly persecuted with guns, snares, and even poison, that it forsook our inhuman country and probably returned to its home. Here, too, along with the specially abundant souslik, there are steppe antelopes and the _Kulan_, the fleet wild horse of the steppes. I must restrict myself to giving a brief sketch of the last, so as not to overstep too far the limits of the time allowed me.