96 
COAL ON THE KALMIUSS.— ALEXANDROFSK. 
well as by the differences in the beds, that the ascent of the Kalmiuss from Kara- 
kuba exhibits on the whole an ascending section, or a passage from older to 
younger strata. 
In the limestone, near a spot called Mantrika, we detected the Spirifer glaber, 
Leptana Hardrensis (Phill.), Asaphus globiceps (Phill.), a small Terebratula, as 
well as some corallines. Coal is again visible, subordinate to a bed of schist, 
east of Gorbatshofskaya, at a spot called Gruskaya, on the south bank of the little 
river Yeskino, where it crops out in small brittle fragments of good quality, and is 
overlaid by psammitic sandstone. At sixty versts to the east of this spot, as we 
were informed, coal has been regularly worked in thicker masses. 
In approaching the higher limits of the Kalmiuss, as we did in dry autumnal 
weather, a geologist might almost be led into an error, and suppose that the lime- 
stone series, of which he had seen so much, was at an end, and that he had at 
length reached the true equivalents of the coal-fields of Western Europe ; for the 
surface of the whole region is then densely covered with the finest black dust. 
At the period of our visit, this substance rose up everywhere from beneath the 
withered grass of the steppes, and looked exactly like the coal-dust near produc- 
tive collieries. This appearance was, however, entirely due to the desiccation of 
the superficial deposit called Tchornozem, or black earth', which covers this por- 
tion of the tract, as well as many other countries in Central and Southern Russia ; 
for wherever a depression and water-course afforded a natural opening, the strata 
were seen to consist of coaly sandstones, flagstones, coarse grits, and yellowish 
impure magnesian limestones (PI. I. fig. 1.), containing fossils of the carboniferous 
limestone. 
At Alexandrofsk, on the left bank of the stream, the only spot in this district 
where coal is worked by the government, the mineral is found to lie on sandstones 
and flagstones with “ coal-plants,” and is distinctly overlaid by a limestone charged 
with species of Productus, Spirifer, and the large Lithodendron, which is abundant in 
the mountain limestone of England and Ireland, the whole dipping 40° north-north- 
east. The coal at Alexandrofsk is about seven feet thick, and is composed of a 
number of fine laminae of brittle, bituminous coal somewhat light, easily de- 
stiuctible, and rendered of less value by frequent thin films of pyritous matter. 
this black earth will be described in the concluding chapters. 
This coal has been partially transported to the Black Sea for the use of the steamers of the Imperial 
flppt * 
