so Sibir became the representative of the Mussulman power in the country east of the Ural. Ancient Finnish culture now had gone. The people of Sibir ceased to use runic writings or to bury their dead in mounds as their Finnish ancestors had done, and assumed the customs of the Mohammedans. From this time forward the Mohammedan khanate of Siberia came into conflict with the ever-growing power of the Slavs on the west of the Urals, and so began the time-honoured struggle between Christian Russia and Mussulman Turk, which has been fought out again and again from that day to this, ever since Russia began to live as a nation.
The first acquaintance of the Slavs with Siberia began in the early part of the eleventh century A.D. The different principalities of which the Slavonic race was at that time composed, the tsardom of Muscovy and the great republic of Novgorod, began first to have relations with the Ugrian-Finnish tribes of North-West Siberia. These regions were rich in boundless supplies of valuable furs, which were highly prized even in those days by the Russians. Thus we hear of the republic of Novgorod early in the eleventh century sending for collectors to Eastern Russia, where they encountered people called Ugrians, who from their descriptions can be no other than the Finnish races as seen in the Samoyedes and Ostiaks of to-day. These pioneers collected furs, exchanged their wares, and returned to Novgorod, but not long afterwards they penetrated again into the great unknown, and this time crossed the Urals, where they found forests stretching in limitless expanse to the east, full of rich furs, and inhabited by other tribes of Finns whom they had never
