MANNER IN WHICH THE DRIFT ADVANCES INTO SOUTHERN VALLEYS. 525 
great distances, the course of the existing north and south valleys at its southern 
extremity. As if, however, to mark how entirely dissimilar the transport has been 
to anything which we can imagine under terrestrial conditions, this ancient detritus 
has usually been propelled in an opposite direction to the present course of the 
waters and consequently up-hill , with reference to the present surface. For example, 
all the rivers of Russia, Poland and Prussia which have their exit into the White 
Sea or Baltic, as well as the Oka and other southern tribixtaries of the Volga, flow 
from the south, yet all the detritus has been propelled from the north. 
There is, indeed, no feature more curious in the distribution of the drift along 
its southern frontier, than its far advance to the south along certain great valleys, 
and its omission in such localities upon the interjacent higher grounds. Such, for 
example, are the heaps of detritus, syenite, granite and greenstone which advance 
into the valley of the Don near Voroneje, and on the west by another north and 
south parallel to the neighbourhood of Putievil 1 on the Sem, a tributary of the 
Desna, leaving (as shown upon our Map) the central dome of Orel almost if not 
entirely free from such transported matter. 
These are truly remarkable facts ; and we feel confident that there are no other 
parts of Europe in which foreign materials have been transported so far as from 
Russian Lapland and Finland to Voroneje and Putievil, points from 700 to 800 
English miles, in straight lines, from the nearest crystalline rocks whence such 
fragments can have proceeded. 
We are not personally acquainted with the marshes of Pinsk, which indicate we 
apprehend the southern limit of erratics in that parallel ; but we are certain that 
the southern granitic steppe to which we have before alluded, was a dividing barrier 
before the period of their distribution, as no portion of it offers evidence of sub- 
aqueous transport. In Poland, however, and in the adjacent part of Russia, we 
found, that in the great valleys of the Vistula and the Oder, the blocks were distri- 
buted precisely as in the valleys of the Don and the Desna. Along the Vistula 
they range in rare and isolated specimens up to the environs of Crakow (500 miles 
from the nearest shores of Sweden), where the northern granites are easily distin- 
guished by their character from those of the adjacent Carpathian chain, the frag- 
ments of which, like those of many other mountains, never advance more than a 
few miles beyond its flanks. In the valley of the Oder also, the same northern 
materials, quite distinct from those of the flanking Silesian mountains, are found 
1 This spot is in the government of Kursk. 
3 r 
