474 ELEVATION OF THE PRESENT CREST OF THE CHAIN AND THE 
western flank of the mountains, and not a particle of it into the low country of 
Siberia, it follows, that by far the greatest variation in physical outline which the 
region has undergone, — one by which a lofty wall was thrown up between Permia 
and the original copper sites of the Ural, — took place at a period posterior to the 
formation of the Permian deposits. 
To illustrate this view, we refer to our proofs, that all the region of Permia was 
submerged during the gathering together of its copper-bearing sediment (charged 
with remains of marine animals, mingled with the branches and leaves of trees), 
whilst the opposite low country of Siberia is entirely void of all such marine- 
formed strata. The original subsoil of Siberia exhibits, as we have shown, ancient or 
palaeozoic rocks only, similar to those of which the chain of the Ural was originally 
composed, covered in part by recent tertiary accumulations, but without a remnant 
of former marine detritus, whether of the carboniferous or Permian seras, such as 
that which overlaps and covers the edges of rocks of the same age on the west. 
It follows, then, as a necessary induction, that when the cupriferous gravel and 
conglomerate were washed into the sea-shores and bottoms west of this chain, the 
tract extending eastwards from it was excluded from such waters, and therefore 
above them. In other words, what we now call the Ural Mountains, then formed 
the rocky shore of a very ancient and probably low continent, from which powerful 
streams descended into a western sea. But did this old continent contain gold 
and platinum as well as iron and copper? Certainly not ; for had it been so, some 
trace, however slight, of gold or platinum must have been found in the Permian 
debris ; and yet long and patiently as the detrital copper-mines on the European 
side of the chain have been worked, no one has ever heard of such an occurrence. 
Nor if we recede further into antiquity and look to some of the earlier “reliquiae” 
of this chain, those, for example, which under the form of carboniferous conglo- 
merates are most clearly indicative of one of its great upheavals, can we detect in 
them any traces of gold ores ; though those conglomerates are compounded of all 
sorts of rocks which pre-existed in the Ural. Searching, indeed, throughout 
the whole series of detritus, whether carboniferous, Permian, or that of much 
younger age, the tertiary beds of Kaltchedansk and Verkhoturie, in none of these 
regenerated deposits has a vestige of gold ore been found. 
To render this inference still more conclusive, it may be stated, that not only the 
absence of auriferous fragments, but the very materials of which the carboniferous 
and Permian conglomerates are composed, similarly bespeak a like change of out- 
