564 
Prof. Milne — A cross Europe and Asia. 
could see that many large boulders had been taken. These were 
gneissic in tkeir cbaracter, and some of them were one or two feet 
in diameter. 
I did not see Lake Baikal until I was almost in it. This was at 
the village of Kultuchno. the entrance to whick is down a steep hill 
leading directly towards the water. It was from the top of this hill 
that I had my first view of what the Bussians eulogize as the ‘ Holy 
Sea,’ the dark blue waters of which contrasted strikingly with the 
small white peaks which capped the distant hills. Large waves 
were forining under a stiff breeze, which jostled packs of floating- 
ice, and drove them into the bays. My road now led round the 
borders of the lake, beside which, for some two or three versts, I 
glided along over the frozen waters of a small lagoon. Before me, 
on the sides of some of the hills which led baclcwards from the 
south end of the lake, I saw some small parallel lines, which I took 
to be old lake-terraces. These were also conspicuous further on 
the road behind the Station of Mooravoya Amoorskaya. 
It was not long before I was travelling eastwards along the 
Southern end of the lake. I was, so to speak, upou a ledge running 
along the face of higli gneissic rocks. Although I had in places 
cliffs above me on the right, and cliffs beneath me on the left, the 
road is by no means so romantic as I had anticipated from the de- 
scription. Notwith standing my elevation, when looking up the lake 
a sea horizon always met my eye. The east and west shores 
of this large piece of water, which is about 400 miles long, and 45 
miles broad, are very different in their appearance, — the eastern 
side sloping gently backwards to peaked hills, and the westem being 
bounded by almost perpendicular cliffs, or eise by steep slopes. 
Along the faces of these latter I fancied I could see a horizontal 
stratification, indicating that their dip was probably towards the 
west. This being the case, then, the origin of the cliff-like face 
upon the western shore of the Baikal is due to a similar cause as 
that producing the greater number of escarpments, which are nearly 
always formed at right angles to the dip of the rock in which they 
are cut. Here, however, instead of having volcanic agencies so 
prominently at work, we have the action of the waters of the lake 
itself, which, washing against its western shore, readily undercuts the 
strata. These strata, like those of a sea-clilf, ultimately fall down, 
and are afterwards washed away. In this way we might suppose that 
the boundaries of the Baikal are extending westwards in a similar 
manner to that in which many of the escarpments of England are 
gradually receding eastwards. Tracing such an action backwards, we 
may readily conceive a time when this lake, instead of being forty-five 
miles broad, was only one mile broad, when it was in fact little more 
than the borders of a river running from the N.E. towards the S.W. 
This might be represented by the right hand branch of the letter V, 
the left-hand portion of which still remains as represented by the 
River Angara, running to the N.W. This may or may not have been 
the origin of the hollow in which the Baikal now rests, but it 
certainly appears to be connected with its enlargement, and is more 
