Quantities of green grass are collected during the, summer and twisted into wreaths, to be hung around the necks of the slaughtered animals; and offerings of tobacco are always thrown to the evil spirits when the Koraks cross the summit of a mountain.  The bodies of the dead, among all the wandering tribes, are burned, together with all their effects, in the hope of a final resurrection of both spirit and matter; and the sick, as soon as their recovery becomes hopeless, are either stoned to death or speared.  We found it to be true, as we had been told by the Russians and the Kamchadals, that the Koraks murdered all their old people as soon as sickness or the infirmities of age unfitted them for the hardships of a nomadic life.  Long experience has given them a terrible familiarity with the best and quickest methods of taking life; and they often explained to us with the most sickening minuteness, as we sat at night in their smoky pologs, the different ways in which a man could be killed, and pointed out the vital parts of the body where a spear or knife thrust would prove most instantly fatal.  I thought of De Quincey’s celebrated Essay upon “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” and of the field which a Korak encampment would afford to his “Society of Connoisseurs in Murder.”  All Koraks are taught to look upon such a death as the natural end of their existence, and they meet it generally with perfect composure.  Instances are rare where a man desires to outlive the period of his physical activity and usefulness.  They are put to death in the presence of the whole band, with elaborate but unintelligible ceremonies; their bodies are then burned, and the ashes suffered to be scattered and blown away by the wind.

These customs of murdering the old and sick, and burning the bodies of the dead, grow naturally out of the wandering life which the Koraks have adopted, and are only illustrations of the powerful influence which physical laws exert everywhere upon the actions and moral feelings of men.  They both follow logically and almost inevitably from the very nature of the country and climate.  The barrenness of the soil in north-eastern Siberia, and the severity of the long winter, led man to domesticate the reindeer as the only means of obtaining a subsistence; the domestication of the reindeer necessitated a wandering life; a wandering life made sickness and infirmity unusually burdensome to both sufferers and supporters; and this finally led to the murder of the old and sick, as a measure both of policy and mercy.  The same causes gave rise to the custom of burning the dead.  Their nomadic life made it impossible for them to have any one place of common sepulture, and only with the greatest difficulty could they dig graves at all in the perpetually frozen ground.  Bodies could not be left to be torn by wolves, and burning them was the only practicable alternative.  Neither of these customs presupposes any original and innate savageness or barbarity on