650 
APPENDIX M. (HIGH RIGHT BANK OF VOLGA.) 
when from one portion of it only, Europe is already supplied with so very large an amount of her chief 
circulating medium? Well, therefore, may political ceconomists now beg for knowledge at the hands 
of the physical geographer and geologist, and learn from them the secret on which the public faith of 
empires may depend.” 
M. 
Why the right bank of the Lower Volga is always higher than the left bank. 
In the text and in the description of the Maps we have simply noted the fact, that the right bank of 
the Volga is almost invariably a high cliff, whilst the left bank is low. This remark requires to be 
modified before a rational attempt can be made to account for a phenomenon apparently so difficult of 
explanation. In the upper portion of its long and tortuous course, when the stream glides down from 
the Valdai Hills by Tver to Mologa and Yaroslavl, and again from the latter city by Kostroma to Yu- 
rievetz, no such feature is dominant ; the left bank being frequently as high as the right. It is specially 
from the point where the Oka is confluent with the Volga at Nijny Novogorod, to the parallel where the 
mighty river quits the hilly grounds of Tzaritzin and Sarepta to debouche into the Caspian at Astrakhan, 
that the right bank is not only invariably the highest, but is in many places absolutely a cliff, standing 
out against the low countries on its left bank l . By a simple glance at our Map, the geological reader 
who has perused our description of the nature and extension of the former Caspian will at once see, 
that all the region occupying the right bank of the Volga from a little below Kazan, to the tract where 
the ground subsides into the low country of the Kalmucks, has the character of the edge of an ancient 
continent, whose eastern shore was washed by the great Aralo-Caspian Sea. Subsequent elevations of 
the whole continent which have desiccated to so great an extent the former bed of that enormous Medi- 
terranean, in the manner we have explained, have simply left the Volga to find its way to the present 
Caspian, along the line of junction of the dried-up sea-beds and the ancient cliff ; the respective relations 
of these masses being preserved. On further inspecting the Map, the reader will see, that the Caspian 
deposits are marked as extending northwards only to Spask ; but here we must observe, that judging from 
the very low form of the grounds on the left bank of the Volga, both at Kazan and in ascending from 
thence by Tcheboksar to Nijny Novogorod, it is very probable that the Aralo-Caspian (the extension of 
which to Spask we should not have known without the researches of M. Jasikoff) may probably have 
ramified in a bay over the low expanses to the north of Tcheboksar and Nijny Novogorod. Those flat 
tracts, occupied by marshes, meadows and woodlands, are however so much overflowed by the Volga in 
the spring months, and have thereby been so overspread with modern alluvia, that it is not likely the 
traces of the residence of the ancient Caspian, if it ever extended there, can now be discovered, although 
the contour of the ground naturally leads us to speculate upon such having been the case. At all events 
we have no need to put forth any theory whatever to account for the phenomenon, from below the city 
of Kazan to the hills south of Sarepta, throughout which space, of about 600 English miles, the low 
country on the left bank of the Volga is shown by its shells to have been the bed of a former Mediterra- 
nean, of which the high grounds on its right bank constituted the western shore. 
1 In a memoir by our friend Major (now Lieutenant-Colonel) Blode, the phaenomenon of the right bank of other 
rivers in Russia being higher than the left is explained by a theoretical view of elevation and depression to which 
we cannot now render justice, having mislaid his work. 
