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On still broader grounds, it is to be hoped that this work will
meet with American success, that it may be an entering wedge to
that valuable literature of geographical research and exploration,
which from incompatibility of language and other causes has never
been fully or even comprehensively opened to English speaking
people. It has been well said by one who has opportunities to
fairly judge that “it has been known by scientists for some time
that more valuable investigation was buried from sight in the
Russian language than in any or all others. Few can imagine
what activity in geographical, statistical, astronomical, and other
research has gone on in the empire of the Czar. It is predicted
that within ten years more students will take up the Russian
language than those of other nations of Eastern Europe, simply as
a necessity. This youngest family of the Aryans is moving
westward with its ideas and literature, as well as its population and
empire. There are no better explorers and no better recorders
of investigations.” It is undoubtedly a field in which Americans
can reap a rich reward of geographical investigation. There is
an idea among some, and even friends of Russia, that their
travelers and explorers have not done themselves justice in recording
their doings, but this in the broad sense is not true. Rather they
have been poor chroniclers for the public; but their official reports,
hidden away in government archives, are rich in their thorough
investigations, oftentimes more nearly perfect and complete than
the equivalents in our own language, where it takes no long
argument to prove that great attention given to the public and popular
account, has been at the expense of the similar qualities in the
official report; while many expeditions, American and British, have
not been under official patronage at all, which has seldom been the
case with Russian research. As already noted, the bulk of similar
volumes from other languages and other archives into the English
has come from Great Britain; but probably from the unfortunate
bitter antagonism between the two countries which has created
an apathy in one and a suspicion in the other that they will not
be judged in an unprejudiced way, Russia has not got a fair share
of what she has really accomplished geographically translated into
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