Verkhoyansk on the Yana (67° 34′ N. and 134° 20′ E.), frosts of
−79.5° F have been observed, and the average temperature of the
three winter months is −53.1°; even that of March only is little
above the freezing-point of mercury (−37.9°). Neither Ust-Yansk
(70° 55′ N., but close to the sea coast) nor Yakutsk, nor even the polar
station of Sagastyr at the mouth of the Lena (73° 23′ N.), has a
winter so cold and so protracted. And yet at Sagastyr temperatures
of −63.6° have been observed, and the average temperature of
February is only −43.6°. At Yakutsk the average temperature of
the winter is −40.2°, and the soil is frozen to a depth of 600 ft.
(Middendorff). The Lena, both at Kirensk and at Yakutsk, is
free from ice for only 161 days in the year, the Yana at Ust-Yansk
for 105. At Yakutsk only 145 days and at Verkhoyansk only 73
have no snow; the interval between the latest frosts of one
season and the earliest frosts of the next is barely 37 days.
The bulk of the inhabitants are Yakuts; there are some 20,000 Russians, many of them exiles, and a certain number of Tunguses, Tatars, Lamuts and Chukchis. The estimated pop. in 1906 was 300,600. The Yakuts belong to the Turkish stock, and speak a dialect of Turkish, with an admixture of Mongolian words. They call themselves Sokha or Sakhov (pl. Sokhalar or Sakhalov), their present name having been borrowed by the Russians from the Tunguses, who call them Yeko or Yekot. Most probably they once inhabited S. Siberia, especially the upper Yenisei, where a Tatar tribe calling itself Sakha still survives in Minusinsk. They are middle-sized, have dark and rather narrow eyes, a broad flat nose, thick black hair and little beard. They are very laborious and enterprising, and display in schools much more intelligence than the Tunguses or Buryats. Their implements show a great degree of skill and some artistic taste. They live in log yurtas or huts, with small windows, into which plates of ice or pieces of skin are inserted instead of glass. During summer they abandon their wooden dwellings and encamp in conical tents of birch bark. Their food is chiefly flesh, and they drink kumiss, or mares' milk. Though nearly all are nominally Christians, they retain much of their original Shamanism. Their settlements are now steadily advancing S. into the hunting domains of the Tunguses, who give way before their superior civilization.
The province is divided into five districts, the chief towns of which are Yakutsk, Olekminsk, Sredne-Kolymsk, Verkhoyansk and Viluisk. Though the production of gold from gold washings has been on the decrease, over 13,000 workers are employed in the Olekma and Vitim gold-mines. Only 43,000 acres are under crops, chiefly barley. Most of the inhabitants are engaged in live-stock breeding, and keep reindeer and sledge-dogs. Fish is an important article of food, especially in the Kolyma region. In the N. hunting is important, the skins taken being principally those of squirrels, ermines, hares, foxes, Arctic foxes, and a few sables, beavers and bears.
The principal channel of communication is the Lena. As soon as the spring arrives, scores of boats are built at Kachungsk, Verkholensk and Ust-Ilginsk, and the goods brought on sledges in winter from the capital of Siberia, including considerable amounts of corn and salt meat, are shipped down the river. A few steamers descend to the delta of the Lena, and return with cargoes of fish and furs. Cattle are brought from Transbaikalia. Two routes, mere horse-tracks, radiate from Yakutsk to Ayan and to Okhotsk. Manufactured goods and groceries are imported to Yakutsk by the former.
See F. Thiess, Das Gouvernement Jakutsk in Ostsibirien, in Petermann’s Mitteilungen (1897), and Maydell, Reisen und Forschungen im Jakutskischen Gebiet in Ostsibirien (St Petersburg, 2 vols., 1895–1896). (P. A. K.; J. T. Be.)
YAKUTSK, a town of Asiatic Russia, capital of the province of the same name, in 62° 2′ N. and 129° 44′ E., 1165 m. N.E. of Irkutsk, on a branch of the Lena. Pop. about 7000. The old fort is destroyed, except its five wooden towers. The wooden houses are built upon high basements to protect them from the floods. Yakutsk possesses a theological seminary and a cathedral. Its merchants carry on trade in furs, mammoth ivory and reindeer hides. The town was founded in 1632.
YALE UNIVERSITY, the third oldest university in the United States, at New Haven, Connecticut.
The founders of the New Haven colony, like those of Massachusetts Bay, cherished the establishment of a college as an essential part of their ideal of a Christian state, of which education and religion should be the basis and the chief fruits. New Haven since 1644 had contributed annually to the support of Harvard College, but the distance of the Cambridge school from southern New England seemed in those days considerable; and a separate educational establishment was also called for by a divergent development in politics and theology. Yale was founded by ministers selected by the churches of the colony, as President Thomas Clap said, to the end that they might “educate ministers in our own way.” Though “College land” was set apart in 1647,[1] Yale College had its actual beginning in 1700 when a few clergymen met in the New Haven with the purpose “to stand as trustees or undertakers to found, erect and govern the College” for which at various times donations of books and money had been made. The formal establishment was in 1701. The Connecticut legislature in October granted a charter which seems to have been partly drafted by Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston; the Mather family also were among those in Boston who welcomed and laboured for the establishment of a seminary of a stricter theology than Harvard, and the ten[2] clergymen who were the founders and first trustees of the College were graduates of Harvard.
The legislature, fearful of provoking in England attention either to the new school or to the powers used in chartering it, assumed merely to license a “collegiate school,” and made its powers of conferring degrees as unobtrusive as possible. In 1702 the teaching of Yale began. In the early years the upper students studied where the rector lived, and considerable groups of the lower students were drawn off by their tutors to different towns. In 1716 the trustees purchased a lot in New Haven, and in the next year the College was established there by the legislature. Commencement was held at New Haven in the same year, but the last of the several student bodies did not disband until 1719. The school did not gain a name until the completion of the first building in 1718. This had been made possible by a gift from Elihu Yale (1649–1721), a native of Boston and son of one of the original settlers of New Haven; he had amassed great wealth in India, where he was governor of the East India Company's settlement at Madras. The trustees accordingly named it Yale College in his honour.
The charter of 1701 stated that the end of the school was the instruction of youth “in the arts and sciences,” that they might be fitted “for public employment, both in church and civil state.” To the clergy, however, who controlled the College, theology was the basis, security and test of “arts and sciences.” In 1722 the rector, Timothy Cutler, was dismissed because of a leaning toward Episcopacy. Various special tests were employed to preserve the doctrinal purity of Calvinism among the instructors; that of the students was carefully looked after. In 1753 a stringent test was fixed by the Corporation to ensure the orthodoxy of the teachers. This was abolished in 1778. From 1808 to 1818 the President and tutors were obliged to signify assent to a general formulation of orthodox belief. When George Whitefield, in 1740, initiated by his preaching the “Great Awakening,” a local schism resulted in Connecticut between “Old Lights” and “New Lights.” When the College set up an independent church the Old Lights made the contention that the College did not owe its foundation to the original trustees, but to the first charter granted by the legislature, which might therefore control the College. This claim President Clap triumphantly controverted (1763), but Yale fell in consequence under popular distrust, and her growth was delayed by the shutting off of financial aid from the legislature.
By the first charter (1701) the trustees of the College were required to be ministers (for a long time, practically,
