This is a charming book, and contains a very interesting description of a New Way Around the Old World. The impression formed from reading it is that the new way is a great deal more uncomfortable than the old way, and yet there is the hope that it will be improved so that it will be the quickest, and perhaps the most popular way. Another impression is that Siberia. and Eastern Russia resemble, in many respects the northern and western portions of North America Amour River, resembling the Mississippi, with its shallow places and sand bars, the railroads through the forest and across the plains resemble our own trans-continental railways as they were twenty or thirty years ago. The steamboats resembling those which formerly plied the rivers of this continent. There are, however, some important differences. In the first place, we never have had a system of exile, and boats full of prisoners being transported to distant points were never seen in this republic. Eastern Russia is a new country, and has great possibilities before it. The same is true of Manchuria. Another impression is that the Chinese are to blame for their own limitations; they might have taken possession of this northern part of their own kingdom, and found an abundance of good land which would have yielded a subsistence to them, and come into line with the advancing nations of the world, but they pursued a policy, which not only was designed to shut out others but which ultimately would have the effect of shutting down all improvement and progress among themselves.
The most important point in an ethnological sense is the fact that one may pass over the Asiatic continent by railroad and see very little of the Mongolians, of either northern or southern stock. In fact, the native tribes seem to be as little in evidence in Northern Asia as they are in North America. The people who were destined to settle upon and improve this region, are not the aborigines but belong to a different stock altogether. An emigrant house on the upper Amour resembles the log-houses and sod-houses which formerly existed on this continent, but which have rapidly disappeared with the progress of civilization. Undoubtedly the case will be the same in Siberia. What the effect will be upon China is uncertain, but the Chinese wall cannot exclude the new civilization any more than it did the old Mongolian savagery. The cuts and plates contained in the book, in themselves show this, and the interesting narrative confirms the impression.
--The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal, Vol. 23