9 GENERAL OBJECTS OF THIS WORK. 
of Europe) has been disturbed by broad undulatory movements only, but has not 
been subjected to great disruptions, nor affected by any intrusions whatever of 
igneous matter ; and further, that all the deposits from the oldest to the youngest 
are very little altered and in many instances unsolidified, we then tiansport oui 
readers to the Ural Mountains and Siberia. Ihere, on the contrary, we indicate 
how formations of the same age as those which in European Russia are slightly 
coherent and horizontal, have been thrown up in mural masses, broken into frag- 
ments, impregnated with minerals and often inverted in their order. All these 
pheenomena occur along a grand meridian fissure in the earth s surface, thiough 
which copious masses of igneous matter have been evolved at intervals from very 
remote antiquity, whilst the chain has undergone elevation and even impregnation 
with gold ores at a period not very distant from our own. Although we naturally 
refer to such disturbances as the cause of the great change that the sedimentary 
masses are there found to have undergone, yet in describing these mutations, a 
clear distinction is drawn between the ancient crystalline or azoic rocks of Scan- 
dinavia on which the Silurian strata rest, and those Uralian metamorphosed rocks 
which often to a great extent assume the same primary characters and aspect. 
In the concluding chapters of this volume we take a general survey of the super- 
ficial deposits of the vast region of the Ural Mountains and Siberia, wherein have 
been found the abundant remains of large mammalia, and which are so celebrated 
for the gold ore they contain ; and reasoning from geological evidences we have 
endeavoured to delineate certain ancient geographical features, at a time when a 
large portion of those vast regions constituted a continent, inhabited by these extinct 
mammals, whose destruction will be shown to have been coeval with the last ele- 
vations of the Ural chain. On the other hand, we adduce our reasons for believing, 
that whilst Siberia and the Ural were above the waters, Russia in Europe must 
have been beneath them ; a conclusion which seems necessary in order to render 
explicable upon rational grounds the phenomena of the great Scandinavian drift, 
by which all the low countries of the north have been covered by far-transported 
materials. Lastly, after an account of that singular overlying deposit the black 
earth of Russia and an attempt to explain its origin, followed by an account of the 
present causes as tending to produce a change of the surface, whether by the agency 
of ice, water, alluvial deposits, or the elevation of land, the first volume is con- 
cluded by a short resumd, showing to what extent our conclusions are borne out 
by an appeal to such extensive observations. 
