584 
RESUME AND CONCLUSION. 
monotonous and fatiguing to the fossilist or lover of varied scenery, this great 
Russian basin, void of all traces of eruptive rock, is, it must be admitted, un- 
rivalled as a theatre for the study of the sedimentary formations in their pristine 
state. The contemplation of it teaches us, that wherever eruptive agency is absent, 
the antiquity ot the formations which constitute the crust of the globe, can in no 
wise be judged of from their mineral or lithological aspect ; for the very oldest 
deposits (Lower Silurian), charged with fossils common to the crystalline slaty 
rocks of other regions, there occur as greensands and half-consolidated, mudlike 
limestones, which, together with many portions of the Devonian, Carboniferous and 
Permian systems, are sometimes not to be distinguished in lithological aspect from 
the younger secondary or even tertiary deposits of western Europe ! 
We also learn, that notwithstanding the absence of violent dislocations, the 
various Russian formations, though horizontal, or so nearly so, that they may be 
all considered conformable to each other, are as distinctly separable by their included 
remains, as in those typical and dislocated tracts where geologists first worked out 
their order. The theoretical doctrine, derived from an examination of a small por- 
tion of the globe, which supposes that the termination of groups of former organic 
beings was entirely dependent upon contiguous eruptions, which ravaging the earth 
at given periods and dismembering the former beds of the ocean, destroyed its 
existing inhabitants, must therefore bend before such copious evidences. These 
evidences most clearly announce, that over spaces as large as other European king- 
doms, the sediment of one palaeozoic period was accumulated around the relics of 
a peculiar set of animals and then tranquilly succeeded by another large formation, 
when different groups of creatures were brought into being, without any sudden 
revolutions or fractures of those portions of the crust of the planet. 
Let us not, however, be misunderstood. Although we have ascertained that the 
framework of the earth has here undergone scarcely any violent ruptures, we have 
already adverted to grand and broad movements of elevation and depression to which 
the whole country must have been subjected, and without which it would be difficult 
to explain the omissions in the series of deposits whereof we have spoken. Thus it 
has been shown, that in one of the very earliest periods, the lowest Silurian rocks 
along the Finnish and Lappish frontier have been highly disturbed and metamor- 
phosed, and that, in the Russian Baltic governments, as in Sweden, they have been 
raised and placed beyond the influence of the waters under which the Upper Silurian 
deposits of the Baltic were accumulated. The lower and upheaved deposits must. 
