228 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



light and exultation by the leaders of religious thought, whereas the 

 work of Mr. Darwin, hardly more than an expansion of Cabell's 

 Unity, in which the same arguments and many of the same instances 

 appeared, was denounced with all the vigor of ecclesiastical vituper- 

 ation. The reason for this difference in reception is not easily seen. 



EXCURSIONS OF THE RECENT INTERNATIONAL 

 GEOLOGICAL CONGRESS. 



By Prof. DANIEL S. MARTIN. 



THE recent meeting of the International Congress of Geologists 

 at St. Petersburg has led incidentally to an important series 

 of publications regarding the geological features of a large portion 

 of European Russia, the Urals, and the Caucasus. Everything con- 

 nected with the meeting was arranged upon a most extensive and 

 liberal scale, and especially the great series of excursions before and 

 after the congress. For these there was prepared a set of hand- 

 books, describing the leading points of geological structure and 

 economic importance, and bringing together a great body of results 

 of recent study, either unpublished before or scattered through 

 various Russian and German periodicals and transactions, and prac- 

 tically inaccessible to the ordinary student. These handbooks or 

 " guides " were prepared with great care by a number of prominent 

 Russian geologists, who divided the routes of the excursions into 

 sections, and went over them in detail during the previous year. 

 When completed the reports were translated into French (a few into 

 German) and beautifully printed as octavo pamphlets. These, to 

 the number of thirty-four, were bound together in a volume of six 

 hundred and forty-eight pages, with a spring cover, such that each 

 paper could be taken out and used separately during that part of 

 the journey which it described.* 



The general editor, Prof. Th. Tschernytschew, observes, in his 

 very modest introduction, that this is the first publication of the kind 

 that has been issued in Russia; and while it can not be placed in 

 comparison with such great general works as have appeared in other 

 lands, like Oldham's Geology of India, Woodward's Geology of 

 England and Wales, or Lepsius's Geologie von Deutschland, he 

 hopes that it may yet present to students a more complete and " up- 



* Guide des Excursions du VII. Congres Geologique International ; avec 39 planches, 

 nombreuses figures, cartes locales et une carte geologique de la Russie d'Europe a l'echelle 

 de 

 28, 1897. 



