MAMMOTH BONES IN THE BASHKIR COUNTRY. 
491 
gold shingle and drift which surround them. The chief of these projecting bosses 
of rock consisted of greenstone passing into a large concretionary felspar rock, 
and in contact with these trappsean masses are veinstones of quartz and calc spar 
in talc schist, &c. These, in short, as well as various others along the eastern edge 
of the Ural-tau, are the rocks out of which the auriferous detritus has been de- 
rived ; and in the great mass of local drift we see quite enough to convince us 
that it must have been got together during long periods of attrition and atmo- 
spheric action. To this coarse and ancient detritus, the existing water-courses have 
simply this relation, — that they have partially hollowed out channels in it, just as 
the rivers of England and France have worn their way through the ancient gravel, 
which is there spread over low and broad expanses, whether former estuaries or 
rivers of those countries. This observation applies, indeed, to every heap ot 
auriferous detritus on the Siberian Hank of the Ural. 
If it were our object we might describe other auriferous localities which we 
visited, such as that of Cossatchi-datclii, where the gold detritus is lodged against 
the foot of the carboniferous limestone, whose fossils and condition have been de- 
scribed, and of the Mindiak river between Verch-Uralsk and the Ural-tau on the 
west ; but we have already said more than enough for the objects of our general 
reasoning 1 . 
In the South Ural, then, as in the North, the remains of mammoths, Bos Urus, 
and Rhinoceros tichorhinus 2 are found in all the coarse detritus; but as that only 
which is auriferous is cut into, the bones are seldom detected out of the line of the 
gold works. The Bashkirs, indeed, attach a superstitious feeling of respect to 
these bones, and have been known to say to the Russian miners who first settled 
among them, “ Take from us our gold if you will, but for God’s sake leave us tlie 
bones of our ancestors 5 .” 
1 In the southern Bashkir districts the upper drift of the country is often composed of black earth, that 
substance covering the coarse shingle, just as the yellow or grey clay surmounts it in the north. Such 
examples are clearly displayed in the valley of the little river Mindiak, between Verch-Uralsk and the 
Ural-tau. In short, no one can have cast his eye over the adjacent regions of Siberia, without seeing 
that this black earth or “tchornozem” is there the most recent of the alluvial accumulations, as it is 
never surmounted by hut always overlaps the coarser alluvia which we have been considering (see the last 
Chapter). 
2 From a description of Pallas it is believed, that remains of mastodon have also been found in the Ural 
Mountains. They have certainly been found in Southern Russia (see p. 503). 
3 The Samoyedes (as Count Keyserling learnt in his tour to the Petchora) have a most singular belief 
respecting the mammoth, which would lead us to suppose, that many entire forms of the animal may from 
