(1.) “after which, he can take another wife, and she another husband.”—The obscene and demoralising customs attributed to the Jassen or Yasses are fully and minutely described by the Abbé Chappe d’Auteroche, who witnessed precisely like ceremonies at Tobolsk, where marriages amongst the natives were thus celebrated (_Voyage en Sibérie en 1761_, etc., Paris, 1768, i, 163, _et seq._). Olearius notices somewhat similar, but certainly milder, doings at Moscow in his time (_Voyages_, etc., 243); and Pitt (_A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mahommetans_, etc., Exon., 1704) recounts something of the sort as occurring among the Algerines. It would appear, from a report recently made by the Ethnological Section of the Imperial Geographical Society of St. Petersburg, that similar practices, but in a greatly modified form, are in vogue amongst the peasantry in some parts of Little Russia.—ED. CHAPTER LXII. (1.) “Karawag.”—This must have been the plain of Karabagh, between the rivers Kour and Araxes, where Shah Rokh spent the winter of 1420, being accompanied by his vassals; Khalyl Oullah, the shah of Shirwan, and Minutcher, his own valorous brother, being among his guests (Dorn, _Versuch einer Gesch. d. Schirwan-Sch._, vi, 4, 549). Like Schiltberger, Barbaro and Contarini have called the Kour, Tigris, and the Tigris, Shat or Set.—BRUUN. (2.) “they call the Germans, Nymitsch.”—This term is borrowed from the Slaves, who have applied it to the Germans from the earliest times, either because the latter spoke an incomprehensible, a dumb language, or, as Schafarik explains (_Slawische Alterthümer_, i, 442), because they followed the example of the Celts, who called certain German tribes settled in Gaul, Nemetes.[1]—BRUUN. [1] Nyemoï is the Russian adjective for dumb. ED. (3.) “then did the sultan of Alkenier conquer it.”—Sis became finally subject to the Egyptians in 1374–75, having fallen into their hands upon several previous occasions, to wit, in 1266, 1275, and 1298 (Weil, _Gesch. der Chal._, iv, 55, 78, 213, 233). They had frequently appeared in force in its neighbourhood, notably in 1278 (Makrizi by Quatremère, I, i, 166), a date which nearly corresponds with the year in which the city was taken; a statement that would have been communicated to the author by his friends the Armenians, the most interested in the fate of their capital. It need not in this case be supposed that Schiltberger confounded the Mahomedan with the Christian year, and that he conceived 655 of the Hegira to correspond to 1277. In 655 or A.D. 1257, Egypt was in too disturbed a state for the sultan to trouble himself about the conquest of Sis.—BRUUN. CHAPTER LXIII.