The Black Earth. 353 



forcibly when tbe conditions in Russia and N. America are compared. 

 Both possessed an ice-sheet, or, at any rate, an abnormal glacier, 

 occupying similar geographical positions. In both, the northern 

 portions are rich in forest, lake, and marsh ; whilst further south 

 spread the broad prairie or the rolling steppe. Not only so, the 

 similarity extends even to the consideration of soil and flora. Only 

 the other day, a short account of North Dakota appeared in one 

 of the newspapers, special stress being laid on the richness of the 

 black soil which there exists. Parallelism of character has been 

 accompanied by parallelism of theorj', and turn by turn, climate, 

 nomads, fine-grained silt, and presence of salts, have been used to 

 account for the absence of tree-life. 



Prof Krasnov arrives at the conclusion that in Russia the process 

 of dessication has gone further than in America ; for, in the latter, 

 as Lesquereux has shown, near the Gulf of Sandousk, on the Mis- 

 sissippi, may yet be seen the marshy prairie covered with small lakes. 

 These views are founded on the supposition that the melting of the 

 ice-sheet must have saturated the soil with water. Lesquereux, 

 indeed, concluded that the prairie lands must have once been 

 occupied by an unbroken chain of lakes and marshes ; gradually 

 the area has been drained, though traces are still left of the former 

 predominance of more lacustrine conditions. 



In Russia, the lakes still exist on a small scale in the Kharkov 

 and Poltava governments ; but these, it appears, are rapidly dis- 

 appearing, having been far more numerous even within the memory 

 of men still living. The shores of one visited by me at the village 

 of Kvianovka, near Voroshba, were crowded with the shells of 

 large Limnece and Paliidince, which had evidently been left behind 

 on the lowering of the water-level. That the change has been of 

 recent date is shown by the fact that the strip bordering this sheet 

 of water is in a very marsh}'^ condition. 



In these districts, too, corn often ripens without having received 

 a drop of rain during the spring, whilst it is stated that the flora is 

 rather that of the marsh than of the steppe. In the south, further 

 removed from the original termination of the ice-sheet, the advent 

 of showers at this season is one of the things most anxiously looked 

 for by the agriculturist, and the flora is of a truer steppe character. 



This interesting question of the floral distribution is also discussed 

 by Professor Krasnov, who says : " The watersheds of the Donetz- 

 Dnieper and Donetz-Don are very rich in species ; along the Dnieper 

 and Volga the number is at least 20 per cent. less. Without regard 

 to climate, the rarest species are found on the highest ground of the 

 district ; these are partly steppe and partly Caucasian forms, charac- 

 teristic of moist mountain meadow-lands near the terminations of 

 glaciers. The districts of Constantinograd and Loubny, in the 

 Poltava government, and those of Volchansk, Starobielsk, and 

 Sviatoia Gora, in the Kharkov government, some of the highest 

 districts in the south, are specially rich in these types. The steppe 

 soil itself also changes its character according to the position, that 

 on higher ground being the richer in humus." 



DECADE IV. — VOL. I. — NO. YIII. 23 



