MINOR DISTURBANCES PARALLEL TO THE URAL. 
469 
forms the outer wall of the Ural chain, the very same limestone is thrown up 
through the Permian deposits, which are also dislocated, in the remarkable outliers 
of Tcheketau, &c. near Sterlitamak. The whole of the hilly tract of Permian 
strata bounded on the east by the river Ik, and on the west by the Ushatirka, and 
ranging southwards across the Sakmara to the Ural river ; in short, all the south- 
western counterforts of the Ural chain are made up of sandstones, conglomerates 
and limestones of the Permian age, which have been affected, though in a less 
degree, upon lines parallel to the carboniferous limestone. In a hill upon the right 
bank of the Ik, a tributary of the Sakmara, near Spaskoi, the sandstones are up- 
wards of 1300 English feet 1 above the sea : and in Mount Girialsk, between the 
Sakmara and Ural rivers, where they are 1085 English feet high, these conglome- 
rates strike north-north-west, south-south-east, and are inclined to the west at 
angles of 35°. In a word, they are there conformable, not only to the carboni- 
ferous limestone (see p. 146), but have exactly the same strike as the chief 
masses of older rocks which constitute the Southern Ural in that parallel of lati- 
tude. In directing attention, however, to these relations, we are quite aware of 
the necessity of drawing a marked distinction between the earlier dislocations and 
alterations which affected the Uralian chain, properly so called, and those which 
have occurred subsequently on its flanks, and on lines parallel to it. The latter 
pertain to geological casualties of a minor order of intensity ; for although these 
flanking Permian strata and the carboniferous limestones which pierce them, have 
been thrown up on outlying parallels, the older or carboniferous deposit, in such 
positions, never exhibits the same altered or dislocated condition as in the Uial 
Mountains, in no portion of which have the Permian deposits ever been detected. 
From all these facts, then, we have come to the same conclusions as those at 
which we arrived after an examination of the Silurian region of the British Isles , 
— that whatever may have been the direction of an ancient fissure in the ciust of 
the earth (we here include all partial deviations and embranchments dependent 
thereon), other parallel outbursts and upheavals have naturally taken place along 
the same line at subsequent epochs. That repetitions of such a phenomenon ought 
in all probability to have occurred along the same lines— those of least resistance- 
through which molten matter had been habituated to find its way to the surface, is 
what any one who reasons from existing analogies might be led to expect ; and that 
it has been so along the chief direction of the palseozoic deposits of Wales and En- 
' These heights, like most of those given, are taken from Colonel Helmer sen’s observations. 
3 p 
