May 24, 1858.] 
CHTNA. 
307 
The Russians, as already stated, have long had intercourse with 
the northern provinces of China ; in fact, their overland commerce 
with the Chinese is of far greater antiquity than our maritime trade 
with this people. Russia has also had, for many years, a reli- 
gious establishment at Pekin, which she has enriched of late 
by attaching to it various men of science, whether miners, geo- 
logists, or astronomers. Of the former, Major Kovanko, of the 
Imperial School of Mines, long ago published an account of the 
coal produce of the environs of Pekin. M. Constantine Skatschkof, 
who has resided nearly eight years at Pekin, as Director of the 
Russian Observatory there, and who, having recently returned to 
Europe, has just visited London, informs me that he has also pre- 
pared an account of those rich coal fields. Though not professing 
to be a geologist, this accomplished gentleman, having inspected 
the fossils of the Museum of Practical Geology, had no hesitation in 
recognizing among our British types, Silurian Graptolites and 
Orthoceratites, with Devonian Spirifers and Carboniferous Producti, 
as being forms which he had seen around Pekin. 
As a large collection of these remains will be brought to Peters- 
burg next year by M. Vasil efsky, the medical officer of the Russian 
Mission, we shall know precisely the extent to which the same 
fossils extended from Britain to China in the palaeozoic times. 
Already, indeed, we may feel pretty certain that such a diffusion of 
similar types prevailed ; for Mr. Lockhart has furnished me with 
fossil shells from the interior province of Sze-chuen, which are 
identical with species of Devonshire and the Boullonais. 
Possessing these palaeozoic rocks, with many ores and metals, and 
vast and rich coal fields, the empire of China, with its rich products 
of the soil, lies before us as a wondrous mine of wealth and lucrative 
commerce, which when opened out to Europeans may operate 
greater changes in our international relations than all the gold of 
California and Australia. 
From the knowledge we have already obtained of the central and 
southern parts of China, it would seem pretty certain that we have 
attached too great an importance to the territory around Canton, 
which is cut off from the vast central and most populous portion 
of the empire, watered by the Yang-tsze-kiang, by a chain of moun- 
tains at no long distance from the seabord. Hence the rivers which 
flow from that ridge to the south, being short and small, are value- 
less as highways for commerce, when compared with the great central 
stream which flows from east to west for a distance of 3000 miles. 
