They Are All Blacke Hayred, Naturally Beardless.

And therefore the Men are hardly discerned from the Women by their lookes:

Saue that the Women wear a locke of hayre down along both their eares." (_Treatise of Russia and the adjoining Regions_, written by Doctor Giles Fletcher, Lord Ambassador from the late Queen, Everglorious Elizabeth, to Theodore, then Emperor of Russia, A.D. 1588. _Purchas_, iii. p. 413.)

In nearly the same way the Samoyeds are described by G. De Veer, in his account of Barents's Second Voyage in 1595.

Serebrenikoff, according to Nordenskold, maintains that _Samodin_ should be written instead of _Samoyed_. For _Samoyed_ means "self eater," while _Samodin_ denotes an "individual," "one who cannot be mistaken for another," and, as the Samoyeds were never cannibals, Serebrenikoff gives a preference to the latter name, which is used by the Russians at Chabarova, and appears to be a literal translation of the name which the Samoyeds give themselves. Nordenskiold, however, considers it probable that the old tradition of man-eaters (_androphagi_), living in the north, which onginated with Herodotus, and was afterwards universally adopted in the geographical literature of the Middle Ages, reappears in Russianised form in the name _Samoyed_. With all due respect for Nordenskiold, I am inclined to agree with Serebrenikoff. In the account of the journey which the Italian minorite, Joannes de Piano Carpini, undertook in High Asia in 1245-47, an extraordinary account of the Samoyeds and neighbouring tribes is given. (See Vol. II. of these Collections, pp. 28 and 95). - I give a very curious engraving of Samoyeds from Schleissing. - Nordenskiold inserts, in his _Voyage of the Vega_, the following interesting communication from Professor Ahlquist, of Helsingfors: - .

"The Samoyeds are reckoned, along with the Tungoose, the Mongolian, the Turkish and the Finnish-Ugrian races, to belong to the so-called Altaic or Ural-Altaic stem. What is mainly characteristic of this stem, is that all the languages occurring within it belong to the so-called agglutinating type. For in these languages the relations of ideas are expressed exclusively by terminations or suffixes - inflections, prefixes and prepositions, as expressive of relations, being completely unknown to them. Other peculiarities characteristic of the Altaic languages are the vocal harmony occurring in many of them, the inability to have more than one consonant in the beginning of a word, and the expression of the plural by a peculiar affix, the case terminations being the same in the plural as in the singular. The affinity between the different branches of the Altaic stem is thus founded mainly on analogy or resemblance in the construction of the languages, while the different tongues in the material of language (both in the words themselves and in the expression of relations) show a very limited affinity or none at all. The circumstance that the Samoyeds for the present have as their nearest neighbours several Finnish-Ugrian races (Lapps, Syrjaeni, Ostjaks, and Voguls), and that these to a great extent carry on the same modes of life as themselves, has led some authors to assume a close affinity between the Samoyeds and the Fins and the Finnish races in general.

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