EASTERN REGION BETWEEN THE URAL AND TROITSK. 
441 
Those alone who have the same respect for a true characteristic fossil as our- 
selves, can imagine the feelings of delight with which we here found congregated 
in one natural Siberian storehouse, so great a number of shells, some of which we 
could not distinguish from well-known forms of the mountain limestone of York- 
shire, Westmoreland and Derbyshire, nor others from species which are abundant 
in the same formation in Belgium and France ! — a striking proof, surely, of the 
wide range of similar influences and conditions under which the creatures ot the 
palaeozoic sera were brought into existence. 
The fossils of Cossatchi-datchi must, therefore, be considered as geological medals 
of high price, in a country throughout which their traces are so much effaced 1 . 
Without this discovery, we could scarcely have ventured to affirm, that many 
other adjacent masses of crystalline limestone, immersed among the granites and 
trappaean rocks of these mountains, belonged to similar or conterminous deposits. 
We shall presently see, that strata of like age are prolonged far to the south in the 
steppes of the Kirghis, where they are still more enveloped by granitic and other 
igneous rocks. 
Eastern Region between the Ural and Troitslc . — In receding further from the Ural 
chain to the south of Miask, and in the parallel of Cossatchi-datchi, the traveller 
who quits the trappsean hills which surround the last-mentione dcalcareous tract, 
finds himself in a low undulating country composed of granite, which partially 
covered by black earth, rises to the surface in numerous knolls, and is well-ex- 
posed on the banks of the Ui, near the small town of Uvelsk. This granite, which 
is large-grained and of a reddish tint, constitutes, in truth, a granitic steppe per- 
fectly destitute of wood, over which we travelled towards Troitsk. The lithological 
character of the subsoil of this steppe, for a considei'able breadth, is only diversified 
by patches of white granular marble or limestone, which, though much altered, 
still exhibits a flaglike structure, and a strike from north- north-west to south -south- 
east, to which, indeed, the contiguous ridges of granite also conform. This direc- 
tion, though divergent from that of the chief adjacent chain, is only to be con- 
sidered as one of those local aberrations from the meridian strike which occur at 
intervals on both flanks of the Ural. At two or three versts to the south-east of 
a village called Kossobrodskaya, a low narrow ridge of regularly bedded, sandy 
1 We owe great obligations to M. Barbot de Marni, the Director of the gold works at Cossatchi- 
datchi, who supplied us with many of our best fossils, and entertained us with the real kindness of all 
the Uralian settlers. The Goniatites Barbottanus (supra) is named after him. 
