Outside of the prehistoric, Byzantine and Christian body of culture, we observe extremely few foreign influences in the popular culture of the Ukraine. It is highly independent and individualized. The Polish and Muscovite influences are very insignificant, and appear only here and there in the borderlands of the Ukraine. It would require the giving of a detailed ethnological description of the Ukrainian people if we wished to draw a complete picture of its peculiar culture. Such a description has no place in geography, and certainly none in a book of such general nature as this. Therefore, I shall discuss but briefly the various phases of the popular culture of the Ukraine, so that in this respect, too, the independent position of the Ukrainians among the peoples of Eastern Europe may appear in the proper light. The Ukrainian villages (with the exception of the mountain villages, which consist of a long irregular line of [194]farms) are always built picturesquely, in pretty places. The huts of a typical Ukrainian village are always surrounded by orchards, which is hardly ever the case among the Russians and White Russians, and very rarely so among the Poles. These neighbors of the Ukrainians plant orchards only in the few regions where professional fruit-growing has developed. In a Ukrainian village, the green of the orchards is considered absolutely necessary. The Russian will not endure trees in the neighborhood of his hut; they obstruct his view. In the Ukraine an orchard is an indispensable constituent part of even the poorest peasant homestead. And the separate farms, in which very much of the spirit of the glorious national past still lives, are hidden in the fresh green of fruit orchards and apiaries. The Ukrainian house is built of wood only in the mountains and other wooded areas. In all other regions it is made of clay and covered with straw. The front windows are always built facing the south. In this way, different sides of the houses face the street, and in general, too, street life does not play so important a part in a Ukrainian village as it does in Polish, White Russian or Russian villages. The Ukrainian houses are always well fenced in, altho not so strongly and so high as the Russian houses in the forest zone, or as the White Russian houses. They usually stand (except in Western Podolia) rather far apart. Thus, the danger of fire is less than in the Russian villages of the Chornozyom region, where the huts lie very close together. As a result, the insurance companies, for instance, charge smaller premiums in the Governments of Kursk and Voroniz for insuring Ukrainian village properties than for Russian.