Summing together the total amount of the Russian fur-trade, Von Baer estimates the value of the skins annually brought to the market by the Russian American Fur Company at half a million of silver roubles, the produce of European Russia at a million and a half, and that of Siberia at three millions. As agriculture decreases on advancing to the north, the chase of the fur-bearing animals increases in importance. Thus, in the most northern governments of European Russia--Wjatka, Wologda, Olonez, and Archangel--it is one of the chief occupations of the inhabitants. In Olonez about four hundred bears are killed every year, and the immense forests of Wologda furnish from one hundred to two hundred black foxes, three hundred bears, and three millions of squirrels. Although the sable and the sea-otter are not so numerous as in former times, yet, upon the whole, the Russian fur-trade is in a very flourishing condition; nor is there any fear of its decreasing, as the less valuable skins--such as those of the squirrels and hares, which from their numbers weigh most heavily in the balance of trade--are furnished by rodents, which multiply very rapidly, and find an inexhaustible supply of food in the forests and pasture-grounds of Siberia. The chase of the fur-bearing animals affords the North-Siberian nomads--such as the Ostiaks, Jakuts, Tungusi, and Samoïedes--the only means of procuring the foreign articles they require; hence it taxes all their ingenuity, and takes up a great deal of their time. On the river-banks and in the forests they lay innumerable snares and traps, all so nicely adapted to the size, strength, and peculiar habits of the various creatures they are intended to capture, that it would be almost impossible to improve them. An industrious Jakut will lay about five hundred various traps as soon as the first snow has fallen; these he visits about five or six times in the course of the winter, and generally finds some animal or other in every eighth or tenth snare. The produce of his chase he brings to the nearest fair, where the tax-gatherer is waiting for the jassak, which is now generally paid in money (five paper roubles = four shillings). With the remainder of his gains he purchases iron kettles, red cloth for hemming his garments, powder and shot, rye-meal, glass pearls, tobacco, and brandy--which, though forbidden to be sold publicly, is richly supplied to him in private--and then retires to his native wilds. From the smaller fairs, the furs are sent by the Russian merchants to the larger staple places, such as Jakutsk, Nertschinsk, Tobolsk, Kiachta, Irbit, Nishne-Novgorod, and finally St. Petersburg and Moscow; for by repeatedly sorting and matching the size and color of the skins, their value is increased.