THE DNIEPER. 273 



bluish fur from those of the pLains. The leeches were formerly exported in large 

 numbers, but they were nearly exterminated during the severe winter of 1840. 



The Pinsk Marsh will soon be a thing of the past. The surveys of 1873 

 showed that the Minsk country sloped towards the Dnieper sufficiently to allow 

 of a regular outflow by removing dams and weirs, and cutting a few drains in 

 the direction of the incline. Since then most of the works have been completed 

 at the relatively moderate cost of £80,000, with which 480 miles of drains have 

 been cut, converting 320,000 acres of swamp into meadows, and carrying oil" tlie 

 superfluous waters from 490,000 acres of forest. The produce of the district may 

 now also be forwarded by navigable canals either to the Vistula or the Niémen 

 basin. These changes have already much reduced Lake Knaz, or Jid, and have 

 otherwise transformed the whole aspect of the land. 



The Dnieper, or Dnepr. 



Yet, of all the great Dnieper tributaries, the Pripet alone still remains without 

 a well-defined course. The Dnieper itself rises much nearer to the Gulf of 

 Finland than to the Euxine, in the low-lying region whence also flow some head- 

 streams of the Dvina, Volga, and Oka, and where the water-partings of the four 

 basins are scarcely distinguishable. At first confined between the basins draining 

 to the Baltic and Caspian, it receives few tributaries above Smolensk and 

 Moghilov ; but below Eogachov it is joined from the west by the Berezina, and 

 by the Soj from the east, after which it is nearly doubled in size by the Pripet, 

 draining most of Minsk, half of Volhynia, and even a portion of Grodno. Then 

 follow the Teterev and the Desna, completing the upper course of the most 

 historical river in Russia, the famous Borysthenes of the Greeks. 



In some parts of its upper course the left banks of the Dnieper are higher 

 than the right, but lower down its right banks, have a mean elevation of from 

 300 to 430 feet. The east side is here composed almost entirely of low-lying 

 alluvial tracts, where the only eminences are former islands slowly raised by the 

 accumulated humus. North-east of Kiev, the Desna flows in a valley which was 

 probably an old bed of the Dnieper, and the now forsaken banks of which may 

 easily be traced. Flowing now 9 miles farther west, the main stream passes 

 along the base of undermined cliffs, whence large blocks get yearly detached 

 during the floods, or under the action of the floating masses of ice when the 

 thaw sets in. The elevation of the right bank has determined the foundation 

 of most of the towns, and the direction of the main highways along the western side 

 of the lower basin. The roads on the left bank are impassable quagmires for the 

 greater part of the year, and the same contrast is presented by the tributaries of 

 the Dnieper, where most of the towns and villages are also on the right bank. 



The breaking up of the ice is seldom attended with danger. Thanks to the 

 southerly course of the river, the ice melts first in the lower reaches, or is carried 

 to the estuary before that of the upper course begins to come down. Thus at 

 Kherson the Dnieper is ice-bound, on an average, for 80 to 85 days only ; at 

 Yekaterinoslav for 89 ; and at Kiev, still higher up, for 96 days. 



