south and the edge of the Russian Forest to the north. The forest edge crosses the Russian Plain sinuously, but in a generally oblique direction, from the northern end of the Carpathians in the fiftieth parallel of latitude to the foot of the Ural Range in the fifty-sixth parallel. Moscow stands a short way within the forest, where are the broad clearings which constituted all of inhabited Russia until the recent colonisation of the steppe southward. As far as the Volga and the Don the wheat-fields have now in large measure replaced the steppe grass, but until a hundred years ago the Cossack outposts of Russia were still based on the Dnieper and Don Rivers, the trees along whose banks alone broke the vast levels of waving grass or of snow.
The forests which clothe the end of the Ural Mountains form a promontory southward into the open steppes, but the grass is continuous through the gateway of plain which leads from Europe into Asia between the Ural Range and the northern end of the Caspian Sea. Beyond this gateway the steppes expand again to even greater breadth than in Europe. To the north of them are still the forests, but to the south are now the deserts and sub-arid steppes of Turkestan. The Transiberian rail-
