UNDER the name of Cossacks of the Bug, of the Don, of the Ural, of Orenburg, of Astrakhan—Cossacks of the Black Sea—and Siberian Cossacks—this hardy and spirited race is disseminated over all the southern portions of European and Asiatic Russia. Every man of them, between the age of fifteen and fifty, is a soldier, eager for war, and ready to engage in it, no matter at what extremity of the earth. The Russian empire is undoubtedly indebted to these tribes for the vast extension of its dominion; and Europe has to thank them for the preservation of her civilization, when threatened by the ruthless Tartar invaders. Nature seems to have fitted the Cossack to become the conqueror of the Tribes of the Desert by endowments as peculiar as those which enable the camel to traverse it. Distance and climate vanish before his wandering and adventurous spirit: the regions where the burning sun destroys all life and vegetation, or those where “the frost burns frore and cold produces the effect of fire,” have never stayed his purpose, or arrested his onward march. With singular versatility he adapts himself to all outward circumstances; as occasion requires, he combines with his warlike profession the labours of the husbandman, the fisher, the herdsman, and the trader, and readily abandons one character to adopt the other whenever it may be needful. It is not only at the point of the lance he has subdued the wild inhabitants of so large a portion of the globe; but by his wonderful facility of adapting himself to the customs of the wilderness, and establishing a commercial intercourse with its fiercest hordes. It required a mixture of the reckless and wandering spirit of the sons of Ishmael, with the intense love of gain peculiar to the children of Israel, both of which his character exhibits, to form the wandering merchant, who could trade and defend his merchandise, and who would penetrate, to effect his purpose, a thousand miles away from his station, either towards the hyperborean regions, or through the parched plains of the naked Steppes.