By some it has been set down as a fault that the stipends allotted to curates have been so much increased, and that, as this arises from the great addition to the population, the laity ought to be called upon to contribute the additional sums required. In the earlier part of this article we have given the reasons which required that these stipends should be raised, and we can only add that when the clergy are doing their work we do not doubt that there will be a response from their parishioners, and that they will be assisted in raising the sums required. But these are not cases which will come under the Act. Our experience is that those who give themselves heart and soul to fulfil the duties of their ministry are never left without friends to help except through their own fault.

Again, it has been urged as a serious fault that, when an incumbent is non-resident with the license of the bishop, he shall not be at liberty without the bishop's permission to resume the duties of his benefice until the expiration of such license. Such an objection seems to us to be unfair and onesided. A curate is persuaded to take charge of a benefice for a definite time; the request may be made by the incumbent because he or a member of his family is sick, or because there have been disputes or scandals in the parish which it is thought his absence might heal. But, however this may be, it cannot be right to break the contract with the curate. Practically nothing has been easier hitherto than to do this : for the future it will not be possible without the sanction of the bishop.

In our opinion, the one special point to be kept steadily in view in all ecclesiastical legislation is the spiritual edification of the people. This can never be done if the temporal interests of the clergy or the separate interests of the laity have more than a due prominence given to them. Vested interests and freehold rights are valuable things in their way, but they are subordinate to the higher ends for which the Church exists, and we are satisfied that they will be best preserved by being never pushed into special prominence.

In conclusion we would remind our clerical readers that before the close of the year they will be called upon to elect one of the five commissioners who will have to adjudicate in all proceedings brought under this Act. It is therefore most important that they should choose wisely and carefully. Men are wanted who will subordinate all questions to the strictest rules of equity; who will judge without respect of person or of party; who have no special fads or crotchets

which they exalt into principles, and admire or condemn others by their agreement or disagreement with them in these matters. What is wanted is commissioners in whom all the clergy of the diocese have confidence; and we are satisfied that, if such are chosen, in the very few cases which will come before them it will be found that the interests of the Church have been safeguarded, whilst the special good of the Act will probably be found in the increased influence with which it will enable the Bishops to deal with those who are now insufficiently alive to the duties and responsibilities of their office.

ART. X.-LANSDELL'S RUSSIAN CENTRAL

ASIA.'

1. Russian Central Asia. By HENRY LANSDELL, D.D. (London, 1885.)

2. The Russian Revolt, &c. By EDMUND NOBLE. (London, 1885.)

SINCE the father of history brought Scythæ and Agathyrsi, Chorasmii and Massagetæ, within the horizon of the Greek mind, involving in that bird's-eye view of the early world religion, ethnography, genealogy, politics, folk-lore, natural history, and legendary myths, we doubt whether a more complete book after its kind has been written than that of which the title is prefixed. The author's previous work, Through Siberia, may be said to have been the passport which carried him through on this later occasion. He became, through the details there given, a grata persona to Russian authorities. He found favour in the eyes of those who from S. Petersburg and Moscow have power to open or to close the routes into Central Asia, and that favour he turned to good account. His prime object in this, as in his previous journey, was the distribution of Holy Scripture, or portions of it, with other devotional works; and he makes due acknowledgment of help received from more than one society devoted to such objects. After passing from Nijni Novgorod by rail to Perm, and thence through the Urals via Ekaterineburg to Tiumen on the Tobol, thence down that river to where it joins the Irtish (the two forming the Obi, the chief river of Western Siberia), and up again from the point of junction by steamer on the Irtish to

Omsk and Semipolatinsk, his route lay through Kuldja, Bokhara, Char-jui, thence north-westward to Khiva, and nearly skirted the sea of Aral's southern extremity, till the Caspian Sea was struck at Krasnovodsk on its eastern shore. After crossing which, he traversed the Caucasian region through Tiflis and Batoum to Odessa, whence he reached London on the shortest day in 1884, having covered over 12,000 miles in 179 days, or at an average of 101 miles a day. Our traveller has had more curious and less cursory eyes in view than those of the 'general reader' merely (although the most discursive skimmer may find much to interest him), since he designs also to furnish materials for the student, and yields, by the aid of various eminent hands whose co-operation he has secured, new objects of research to the scientific specialist. Thus he is enabled to add appendices on the fauna and flora of Central Asia, including lists with descriptions of Araneæ, Crustacea, Coleoptera, &c., of the Steppes and other regions traversed, contributed by various scientific naturalists, while other occasional notices of the flora and fauna are interspersed alike in text and notes. The imperial House of Romanoff appears, by the way, to contain a 'lepidopterist' of its own. The work is illustrated by a map showing line of route, and by not a few sketch-engravings and photographs. Notices of trades and manufactures, of commodities and their prices, of schools and institutions, of criminals and prisons, of routes and fares, of values and weights, of bills of fare and excise duties, also occur, with an occasional chapter from the progressive history of Russian annexation. Throughout the whole of this journey Dr. Lansdell was accompanied by a young physician, Dr. Alfred Sevier, who joined him from Vienna, just before he reached Perm, and only left him at Odessa. The chief contretemps which occurred to them was in an early stage of their journey, occasioned partly by the author's omitting to mention, before leaving Perm, his wish to distribute at once his books, &c., partly by the officiousness of a gendarme and a badly worded telegram. He was, in short, a few hours in arrest under suspicion of being an agent of the Nihilist propaganda, who 'not only put seditious leaflets into duly authorized tracts to distribute, but I have heard, on good authority, of a Bible having been seen, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation, but filled in with-Nihilistic matter!' Dr. Lansdell's books, &c., were sent on before him to Tiumen, where he found them shipped by mistake for Tomsk, and narrowly escaped a month's delay by obviating the misdirection just in time-packed in strong wooden boxes, iron

hooped at the ends, and corded; and when I arrived and found thirty of them awaiting me, to say nothing of personal baggage and provisions, I confess to feeling a little alarmed at the burden prepared for my back. . . . They were printed in Russian, Sclavonic, Hebrew, Chinese, Mongolian, Kirghese, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Polish, German, and French.' At Tiumen a strong telega, or wagonette, in which to carry these, was obtained by an English friend whom Dr. Lansdell had known on his former Siberian journey. He conciliated, moreover, the favour of the Archbishop of Tobolsk, as well as of governors-general, mayors, postmasters, and others. In short, all the powers, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, seem to have been successfully secured; and the author notices with pleasure the fact that his books, even when given from hand to hand or sold in liquor-shops for drams, seem to have been well treated and neither defaced nor torn. Great industry in note-taking and writing while impressions were fresh are among the qualifications of Dr. Lansdell for a traveller, while as a distributor or colporteur on a grand scale he seems to have shown much tact and discretion, and to have a vigilant and discerning eye in detecting the leading traits of the native mind and character. The Kirghese population, partly settled, partly nomad, like the 'agricultural' and the 'nomad Scythians' of Herodotus, were taxed up to 1869 on their herds of cattle, which fact they have ever since made a reason for always understating these in their returns' to Government. 'But,' remarks our author, while a Kirghese gives the smallest figure for his own herds, he has no objection to tell the truth about those of his neighbours,' and thus 'it was judged by the Russians that . . . it was necessary to multiply the nomad returns by three' for some districts and 'by two' for others. The present unit of taxation among them is the kibitka (or tent), each of which pays 6s. a year, and full details of their excise duties, quit rents (for Cossacks), local rates, and military or other liabilities are given. Returns and statistics, however, gathered from the statement of semi-barbarians who count on their fingers, with a continuation on their toes, and then call into the notation their neighbours' fingers and toes, are noticed by the author as untrustworthy. He has been at great pains to collect statistics of the nationalities, classes, religions, &c., of the population, as furnished by Government; and speaks of the minuteness of the details required from every provincial governor. One of these enumerations (p. 108) strikes the reader who pauses to examine its figures as not a little mixed.' Thus, after enumerating the figures for each 'rank' of the

་

community, we find the percentages given as follows:-'90.85 per cent. were Kirghese; then followed the Cossacks, 4'31 per cent.; bourgeois, 185; peasants, 88; and soldiers, 88.' But how could there possibly be 88 per cent. of any other class, much less 88 per cent. of each of two, when over 90 per cent. have been assigned to the first-named? It seemed possible that *88 might have been intended, but even this will not complete the required 100 for the total of the percentages. Besides, the peasants have, in numbers, been just above given at 4,762, and the soldiers, under various items, at a total of 7,623, or nearly half as many again. How then could these yield the same percentage, whether 88, or 88, or 8·8, on the same total of population? Then follows a computation of the purely nomad Kirghese at 'little more than one-third of the whole,' the remainder not wandering in winter from their fixed quarters. The remaining 54,431 (or 1067 per cent.) constitute the settled population.' Here the remaining' and the previous 'remainder' are not apparently the same item. But further, if 'the remaining' means that which 'remains' from the total population, 538,385, given previously, after the Kirghese, 489,134, have been deducted, the sum will not tally, since on so deducting there remain, not 57,431, but 49,251. This is, however, the only passage in which Dr. Lansdell ventures on such minute statistics, and for more reasons than one we are rather glad that it is so.

A lightly touched-in sketch of early Russian conquest leads one to remark that the hearts of great continents contain human society under its least changed forms. Assuming, then, Asia as the starting-point of humanity, the most primitive and rudimentary forms of that society may probably be looked for there. In their normal state these are loosely cohesive and readily absorbed by the nearest powerful organization-as the Russian. Only in a few periods of extraordinary swarming-over has mutual pressure forced them into powerful cohesion, and at the same time into an energetic impulse of forward movement. Barring such exceptional crises as serve thus to weld them into a mass, the whole tribal system is loose and friable. Russia presses forward, and the fugitive particles adhere to her. This has been going on since the sixteenth century. A report from the Governor of Siberia of gold to be found in Yarkand, although this lies considerably to the south of the Tian Shan mountains, and 500 miles or so east of Kashgar, induced Peter the Great to send a company of merchants in the train of his armed force with skilled persons . . . to purchase or even examine