Between the Black Lands and the southern seas lie the steppes proper wherein the dead level of the country, the absence of all arboreal vegetation, and the summer droughts attain their maximum. These great plains, covering over half a million miles of Europe, include many different qualities of soil, destined to as many different ends. The sandy, stony, saline steppes will forever be unfit for cultivation. The fertile steppes which occupy the greater part of the space between the Black Lands and the Black Sea and the sea of Azov consist of a layer of black vegetable mould ready for cultivation and teeming with fertility. The grass, growing five or six feet high, in rainy seasons even higher, accounts in some measure for the absence of woods: its rapid luxuriant growth would smother young trees. The virgin steppe with its rank vegetation--the steppe of history and poetry--diminishes day by day, and will soon disappear before the agricultural invasion. The legendary Ukraine has almost lost its wild beauty; Gogol’s steppe, like Cooper’s prairie, will soon be but a memory--lost in the black belt. The long delay in opening up these grassy plains is due as well to the lack of water and wood as to the lack of workers. The lack of water is difficult to remedy, hence the plains are bound to experience alternately good and bad years; hence, also, the frequent famines in lands which otherwise might be regarded as the storehouse of the empire. Perhaps an even greater drawback is the lack of trees; thereby the population is deprived both of fuel and of materials for building. Stalks of the tall steppe-grasses and the dung of the flocks, which otherwise would go to the soil, supply it with a fuel that would not suffice for a dense population. The introduction of railroads and the opening of coal mines will, however, remedy little by little these evils, by supplying fuel and restoring the manure to the soil. The proximity to the estuaries of the great rivers and to the Black Sea renders the position of these steppes especially favourable to trade with Europe. The Ural-Caspian depression is as truly a desert as the Sahara. It contains but few oases. These saline steppes sink in part below the sea level, like the Caspian itself, whose ancient basin they formed, and which now, narrowed and sunk, lies about eighty-five feet below the Black Sea’s surface. This region is of all European Russia the barest, the driest, and the most exposed to extreme seasons. It is decidedly Asiatic in soil, climate, flora, fauna, and inhabitants. This barren steppeland, covering three hundred thousand square miles, has less than a million and a half inhabitants. It is good for nothing but pasturage; and is therefore overrun with nomad Asiatic tribes.