Reviczv of Recent Geological Literature. 327 
Asiatic Russia. By George Frederick Wright. Two volumes, pp. xxii, 
xii, 637, with 10 maps, and many illustrations from photographs. 
New York : McClure, Phillips & Co., 1902. Price, $7.50, net. 
This very comprehensive work is based largely on the observations 
of the ai:thor during a tour in the year 1900, with his son, Frederick 
Bennett Wright, through China, Siberia, Turkestan, and Russia. It is 
extended, however, outside the range of their travel, to treat quite fully 
of all the vast area owned by Russia in Asia, as to the physical 
geography, the history of the Russian conquest and colonization, the di- 
verse native tribes, the present social, economic, and political conditions, 
and the archaeology, geology, climate, flora, and fauna. The entire area 
comprises six and a half million square miles, or nearly twice that of the 
United States and Alaska. 
Professor Wright, after considering the history, resources, and pres- 
ent conditions of the country and people, gives the following optimistic 
view for the future of this great empire. "Looking at Asiatic Russia as 
a whole and with its present limits, it is therefore easily within the 
bounds of possibility, and even of probability, to expect that before the 
close of the twentieth century it will have a population of 100,000,000, 
provided a stable government can be maintained and peace be permitted 
to reign, so that man shall be unhindered in his efiforts to perfect his 
conquests over the powers of nature. With this vision before him it is 
not surprising that the Tsar should long for peace, nor that he should 
be almost alone in this desire ; for, more than any other country in the 
world, Russia is in position to obtain the main objects of national ambi- 
tion through the next one hundred years by turning attention to the 
development of the internal resources of her own empire. Apparently 
there are operating within her body politic all the forces which, if wise- 
ly guided, will secure the highest objects of national ambition, namely, 
a steady increase of population, accompanied by a corresponding in- 
crease in the material supplies, necessary for the comfort of the people, 
and for that association with one another and contact with the outer 
world which is necessary to foster the highest social and intellectual 
progress." 
One of the leading motives for this extensive travel across Asia was 
to study the Quaternary geology, with the expectation that extensive 
jnountainous and plateau regions in the interior of the continent would 
be found covered with glacial deposits. Though the high mountain 
ranges now bear conspicuous glaciers and snowfields, no evidences of a 
general ice-sheet covering large districts were found. But lake Baikal, 
1,561 feet above the sea, and 4,186 feet deep, inhabited by seals almost 
identical with a species of the Arctic Ocean, indicates that great epeiro- 
genic movements have taken place there in very late geologic times. 
From the amount of sediments brought into this lake by its largest 
tributary, the Selenga river, the time since the lake began to exist is 
estimated as no more than 50,000 or perhaps even 30.000 years. The 
general changes of land altitude and contour implied by the formation of 
lake Baikal seem thus to have been a part of the vast epeirogenic 
