THE URAL VIEWED AS A GREAT MERIDIAN CHAIN. 
339 
Baron Humboldt, we may add, was among the first to urge us onwards in this 
work, and has throughout our labours afforded us every assistance. 
But even when so encouraged, our task would have been hopeless, had we not 
previously made ourselves well acquainted with the nature and order of the strata 
which occupy the great adjacent regions on the west. It was only therefore, after 
we had learnt our lesson amid the slightly consolidated and unbroken deposits of 
Russia in Europe, whose history and succession have been explained, that we 
ventured to decipher the intricate relations of rocky masses, which in the Ural are 
thrown about in much apparent confusion. Before, however, we enter upon the 
details of this survey, we would explain a few of the difficulties which are opposed 
to the establishment of clear results ; and in doing so, throw a glance over the 
general contour and external condition of the chain. 
Viewed as the great barrier wffiich separates Europe from Asia, and pertaining to 
both, the Ural Mountains, in a limited view, have been usually said to range from 
the Arctic Ocean on the north, to the parallel of Orenburg on the south, or 
throughout 18° of latitude. 
Though no travellers have yet continuously explored these tracts of the chain 
which lie between 65° north latitude and the Northern Sea, there is little doubt, 
from what has been detected in the Isle of Vaigatz, where Silurian and other pa- 
leozoic fossils occur, that the geological system of the Ural is continuous to that 
point 1 . We know, indeed, from the explorations of Captain Strajefski to 65° north 
latitude, that the axis of the chain, at least its eastern flank, is composed of rocks 
essentially similar to those of the Ural of the Russian miners, and from that point to 
the Northern Ocean other jwoofs have been obtained that the chain is persistent in 
its characters 2 . Again, by the recent explorations of one of our own party (Count 
Keyserling) to 66^-° north latitude, we have ascertained, that the western flanks of 
the chain (near the sources of the river Ussa) are composed of the same palaeozoic 
rocks which we are about to describe in the colonized and mining districts. 
But in a wider geographical and geological sense the Ural Mountains have 
■ That the central axis of the Ural is prolonged to the isle of Vaigatz, was recently ascertained by 
the observations and collections of the naturalists Schrenk and Lehmann. See also Hermann, Mineral. 
Beschreib. vol. i. p. 4 ; and Humboldt, Asie Centrale, vol. i. p. 464. 
3 We have already alluded to the discovery of Jurassic strata in latitude 64 on the east flank of the 
Ural by Captain Strajefski (p. 230), and of the same on its western flank by Count Keyserling in a still 
higher latitude. These sedimentary flanking deposits have obviously no connection with the structure of 
the chain. 
