If we compare some of the Oural mountains with the general strata of the Russian plains, then, as to the contained minerals, we may find a certain diversity in those two places; at the same time, no greater perhaps than may be found betwixt two different bodies in those same plains, for example, chalk and flint.  But when we consider those bodies of the earth, or solid strata of the globe, in relation to their proper structure and formation, we surely can find in this description nothing on which may be founded any solid opinion with regard to a different original, however important conclusions may perhaps be formed with regard to the operations of the globe, from the peculiar appearances found in alpine.

From this detail of what is found in the Oural mountains, and in the gradation of country from those mountains to the plains of Russia, we have several facts that are worthy of observation.  First extensive mountains of jasper.  I have a specimen of this stone; it is striped red and green like some of our marly strata.  It has evidently been formed of such argillaceous and siliceous materials, not only indurated, so as to lose its character, as an argillaceous stone, but to have been brought into that degree of fusion which produces perfect solidity.  Of the same kind are those hornstein rocks of the nature of flint, sometimes tending to the nature of a fine sandstone.  Here is the same induration of sandstone by means of fusion, that in the argillaceous strata has produced jasper.  But oblique veins of jasper are represented as traversing these last strata; now this is a fact which is not conceivable in any other way, than by the injection or transfusion of the fluid jasper among those masses of indurated strata.

All this belongs to the east side of the mountains.  On the west, again, we find the same species of strata; only these are not changed to such a degree as to lose their original character or construction, and thus to be termed differently in mineralogy.

Our author then proceeds. (p. 53.)

“Nous pourrons parler plus decisivement sur les montagnes secondaires et tertiaires de l’Empire, et c’est de celles-la, de la nature, de l’arrangement et du contenu de leurs couches, des grandes inegalites et de la forme du continent d’Europe et d’Asie, que l’on peut tirer avec plus de confiance quelques lumieres sur les changemens arrives aux terres habitables.  Ces deux ordres de montagnes presentent la chronique de notre globe la plus ancienne, la moins sujette aux falsifications, et en meme-tems plus lisible que le caractere des chaines primitives; ce font les archives de la nature, anterieures aux lettres et aux traditions les plus reculees, qu’il etoit reserve a notre siecle observateur de feuiller, de commenter, et de mettre au jour, mais que plusieurs siecles apres le notre n’epuiseront pas.