VI 
PREFACE. 
After this effort, some years elapsed before the geological school of 
St.Petersburgli began to participate in the forward movement which the 
study of organic remains had produced in other parts of Europe. The 
first signs of advance are to be seen in the works of M. Eichwald and 
M. Pander on the fossils of the Baltic governments and the environs of 
St. Petersburgh. But notwithstanding these publications, the utmost 
doubt and confusion prevailed respecting the geological relations and 
succession of the different rock masses. No one had attempted to 
carry out the general project of Strangway s ; nor even had any one then 
observed, that the strata in the neighbourhood of the metropolis of 
Russia were the oldest in which remains of organic life could be traced, 
and were overlaid by other groups charged with distinct fossil con- 
tents. Nor was any sort of connection traced between the various 
strata. The red-coloured deposits of Novogorod, Lithuania and Cour- 
land, for example, were still considered to belong to the New Red Sand- 
stone, chiefly because they contained rocks of gypsum and springs of 
salt ; whilst their most striking fossil reliquim were said to be bones of 
Saurians and Chelonian reptiles. If such had been the case, coal-beds 
might be looked for beneath such red deposits, and the correct determi- 
nation of their age became, therefore, of great importance to Russia. 
The publication of the ‘ Silurian System’ first dispelled this confusion. 
In that work Mr. Murchison succeeded in proving, that the Russian 
organic remains described by Pander must be the equivalents of those 
which occurred in certain lower fossiliferous strata of the British Isles ; 
and, by studying its pages, Russian geologists at once saw, that the red 
strata immediately surmounting their Silurian strata were characterized, 
as in the British Isles, by certain fishes (among the most striking of 
which is the Holoptychhis nobilissimus ), — the very forms, in fact, that 
until then they had supposed to be the remains of reptiles and tortoises. 
The inference, indeed, was so evident, that M. von Buch, who had not 
visited tfie country, but to whom its fossils had been sent, speedily 
communicated to Mr. Murchison his conviction, that Russia, when 
