178 
TOTMA— VOLOGDA— YAROSLAVL— KOSTROMA. 
the Old Red system 1 of the British Isles. The river Strelna offers vertical 
cliffs, 200 feet high, and the Suchona, into which the former falls, runs be- 
tween banks not less than 240 feet high, of which the following may be taken 
as a generalized section in ascending order. Red flaglike marl with conchoidal 
fracture. Cornstone or earthy tufaceous white limestone, in irregular sub-con- 
cretionary thin beds, burnt for lime, but containing no traces of shells. Red 
and green marls alternating for a gi’eat thickness in a beautifully ribboned arrange- 
ment. Courses of very impure concretionary limestone. Red and green marls 
repeated. The whole is capped by drift and blocks. These diversified marls, with 
calcareous courses, occupy the whole territory, and to recapitulate sections would 
therefore be useless. They are invariably so void of fossils that they obtained from 
our friend Baron A. von Meyendorf the significant name of “ calcaires muets ” 
(mute limestones" 2 ). 
At Totma and several other places, these red deposits are the source of salt 
springs, and gypseous strata are passed through in the sinkings. At \ ologda the 
substratum is obscured by a vast spread of detritus, which extends over the western 
side of the government, and ranging up to the eastern water-sheds of the Valdai 
Hills, and the lakes near Vitegra on the north, hides all the subjacent rocks. It 
was in vain that we explored the country, in a long and laborious circuit, extending 
westwards from Vologda to Tcherepovetz and Vesegonsk, and thence to Mologa ; for 
the whole of this tract is so covered by sand, gravel and northern detritus, that we 
never could detect the subjacent rocks. Red marls appear, however, from beneath 
this mass near Rybinsk and other places, and also on the Unja river near Makarief, 
though they are hidden again under detritus, at the beautiful city of Yaroslavl. 
In descending the Volga from Kostroma to Nijni Novogorod, the red marls, 
though frequently covered by detritus, are seen to occupy the banks for long 
spaces, surmounted, here and there, by shale of the Jurassic series, which we shall 
presently describe. At Krasnoe Pojeni, near Pies, twenty to thirty feet of finely 
laminated and spotted red and green marls, with occasional geodes of harder green 
1 See ‘ Silurian System,’ p. 55. Similar bands have been just alluded to in the sections north of 
Ustiug, p. 170. 
2 A party of our first expedition, consisting of the Baron A. von Meyendorf and M. E. de Verneuil, 
traversed the country to the south of Ustiug by Nikolsk, and found it to be essentially the same as that 
which we are now describing, until they fell in with overlying Jurassic shales at Makarief on the Unja 
river (see Map). At the same time Mr. Murchison, accompanied by Lt. Koltsharof, made the wide range 
by Vologda, Tcherepovetz, Mologa, Rybinsk and Yaroslavl, alluded to in the text. 
