GENERAL GEOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF THE CHAIN. 
351 
are in such a broken and mineralized condition, that the age and nature of the strata 
can be recognized at intervals only, we have but to descend to their western or 
European slopes, to learn how very distinctly they regain their depositary character 
and graduate upwards into well-recognized Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian 
deposits. In fact, by travelling from the mountains, to the comparatively low 
grounds in the governments of Perm and Orenburg on the west, whether along the 
banks of the Tchussovaya or Bielaia rivers, or even by some of the roads, any 
practised geologist may satisfy himself, that notwithstanding numerous contortions 
and even inversions towards the axis of the chain, the lower palaeozoic strata (Silu- 
rian and Devonian) are eventually overlaid by carboniferous, and the latter by 
Permian deposits. Still more beautiful examples of the development of the oldest 
of these palaeozoic rocks will be made apparent, when we come to explain the 
structure of the more northern or Ai'ctic Ural. 
From our previous pages (pp. 137—168 et seq .) the reader will have gathered, 
that the Ural chain, must have been to some extent elevated into dry land at 
a very early period, or immediately after the formation of the carboniferous lime- 
stone ; for it has been shown, that the Permian accumulations of the adjacent 
lower country are, to a great extent, made up of the debris of the older Uralian 
rocks, that they contain fossil vegetables which must have grown on these 
mountains, and also have derived their singular cupriferous character, either from 
mineral springs connected with the metamorphism of the Ural, or from the 
wearing away or destruction of the numei’ous masses of copper ore which were 
formed in that chain at a period of high antiquity. 
Whilst the features of the western slopes of the chain thus enable us to connect 
the obscurer masses of the Ural with unequivocal and well-known sti'ata, whose 
position is established, the Siberian flank, on the contrai’y, exhibits no such clear- 
ness of order : even there, however, we were enabled to decipher a disjointed suc- 
cession, from Silurian to carboniferous strata, though at rare intervals only, and 
amid occasional deviations from natural sequence. Instead of occupying con- 
tinuous zones, as on the west, the strata containing organic remains on the Asiatic 
side of the crest, are alone traceable at wide intervals, their fragments being cut off 
by and almost buried under bands of eruptive and crystalline character, which 
running from north to south and parallel to the chief chain, coriugate and em- 
bellish the surface by numerous asperities of outline. (See the Maps, PI. VI. 
and VII.) 
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