As barbarous, says Dr. Hartwig--to whose pages we are here indebted--as barbarous as the poor wretches who submit to his guidance, the Tadibe is incapable of improving their moral condition, and has no wish to do so. Under various names,--_Schamans_ among the Tungusi, _Angekoks_ among the Eskimos, _Medicine-men_ among the Crees and Chepewyans,--we find similar magicians or impostors assuming a spiritual dictatorship over all the Arctic nations of the Old and the New World, wherever their authority has not been broken by Christianity or Buddhism; and this dreary faith still extends its influence over at least half a million of souls, from the White Sea to the extremity of Asia, and from the Pacific to Hudson Bay. The Samojedes, like the Siberian tribes, offer up sacrifices to the dead, and perform various ceremonies in honour of their memory. Like the North American Indians, they believe that the desires and pursuits of the departed continue to be the same as they were on earth; and hence, that they may not be in want of weapons or implements, they deposit in or about their graves a sledge, a spear, a cooking-pot, a knife, an axe. At the funeral, and for several years afterwards, the kinsmen sacrifice reindeer over the grave. When a prince dies, a Starschina, the owner, perhaps, of several herds of reindeer, his nearest relatives fashion an image, which is kept in the tent of the deceased, and to which as much respect is paid as was paid to the man himself in his lifetime. It occupies his usual seat at every meal; every evening it is undressed, and laid down in his bed. For three years these honours are kept up, and then the image is buried, from a belief that the body by that time must have decayed, and lost all recollection of the past. Only the souls of the Tadibes, and of those who have died a violent death, are privileged with immortality, and hover about the air as disembodied spirits. [Illustration: A SAMOJEDE FAMILY.] * * * * *