GENERAL SUCCESSION OF DEPOSITS IN RUSSIA. 
7* 
palaeozoic strata are for the most part in such a highly disturbed and fractured 
condition (sometimes, indeed, inverted), that their true symmetry is not easily 
ascertained. Such difficulties are, in truth, much increased throughout Western 
Europe by the prevalence of rocks of igneous origin, through whose eruption many 
dismemberments and alterations of the strata have been produced. 
Russia, on the contrary, being a vast region, by far the greater portion of 
which has been singularly exempted from all such igneous agency, is found to 
pie»ent an unaltered succession of older rocks, whose nature we shall presently 
define, by considering them in an ascending series ; and in doing so we hope, not 
°uly to exhibit the distinct development of the earliest sedimentary strata over a 
very wide space, but also to point out that certain desiderata not supplied by other 
countries are there clearly furnished. This we shall endeavour to do, first, by 
developing an unequivocal base-line of palaeozoic existence in the Lower Silurian 
strata, as indicated both by the gradual decrement and disappearance of vestiges 
of animal life in the inferior member of the series, which, void of all traces of the 
lowest vertebrata and containing fucoids only in the inferior beds, rest upon pre- 
existing crystalline rocks without fossils ; secondly, by pointing out over large 
territories, the co-existence in the same strata of the fossil fishes of the Old Red 
Sandstone of Scotland with the shells and other fossils of the shelly and calcareous 
locks of South Devon and the Eifel 1 — thus demonstrating that they constitute one 
inseparable natural group ; and thirdly, after describing a peculiar form of the car- 
boniferous system and giving a detailed account of the coal-bearing tracts in the 
empire, by establishing under the name of “ Permian” a copious series of deposits 
which form the true termination of the long palaeozoic periods. 
This last-mentioned system has not hitherto obtained the attention to which it 
is entitled. In France it is known only as a deposit of red sandstone with a few 
plants ; in Belgium it is a mere conglomerate (the “ Pene'en” or sterile group of 
M. d’Omalius d’Halloy). In England and Germany, where its members are much 
m ore expanded in the form of red sandstone and conglomerate, magnesian lime- 
stone, copper slate, &c., the strata have never received a collective name, nor have 
they till recently been united as a natural group 2 , distinguishable from the inferior 
We have just ascertained from M. Vogt, the friend of Agassiz, that certain remains of fishes brought 
t>> us from Gerolstein in the Eifel, belong to the Old Red genera Osteolepis and Coccosteus. 
Professor Phillips was the first to maintain, that the fossils of the magnesian limestone of England 
u a ht to be classed with those of the palaeozoic rocks, and our Permian researches confirm his view. 
