At the railway stations all sorts of queer people are to be seen, the men mostly wearing bright-coloured shirts, and tall red leather, or felt boots; but the nomadic tribes of Buriats, who cultivate parts of the country with great industry and success, are not often to be seen near the railway. The Buriats on the eastern side of Lake Baikal are Buddhists, but those on the west still cling to their original religion—Shamanism. This mainly consists in the worship of gods, called “Ongons,” supposed to protect both house and property. The former are hung up in a box inside the house; the latter, along with the skins of squirrels and other small animals are in a box fastened to the top of a pole, with a little roof over it in the fields. Every man has his own Ongon as soon as he marries, and when he dies it is taken down from the pole and hung up in the woods, where it eventually rots to pieces. In a most interesting volume the American linguist and ethnologist, Jeremiah Curtin, describes these strange tribes. He tells how he witnessed the Horse Sacrifice, one of the most ancient of Mongol ceremonials, and which is still perpetuated among Buriat clans. He saw it performed in 1900 on a hill called Uhér, about seven miles from Usturdi, which is some forty miles from Irkutsk. There are fifteen large altars on the hill, on which the sacrifices are offered to the Burkans (namely the gods) of the hill. These gods include “The Lofty Clear Heaven,” “The Revered Pure Earth,” “Bull Prince Father,” “Blessed Mother Mist,” “The Creating Great One” (the hedgehog, who is considered by the Buriats to be the wisest of all deities), “Grandfather Bald Head,” “Creator of Cattle,” “Crooked Back,” &c. The different families of the first and second divisions of the clan Ashekhabat have each their own place near one or other of the altars. The leaders of the ceremony invoke all the different deities by name and in turn, while the people pray either aloud or in silence for what they want. Then the horses are killed, and after that they are rapidly skinned and dismembered, the bones being burnt in roaring fires on the fifteen altars. The flesh is boiled in iron kettles, and when it is cooked all the people stand in groups by the altars, receding and advancing towards them at intervals, and reciting the following invocation to the deities, together with any special petitions of their own.