Abstract
IT is no easy matter to render an account of the proceedings and publications of the “Imperial Russian Geographical Society.” So numerous are its sections, and so prolific is each of them, that to master the whole of the information yearly made available by them would be no easy task, even for a reader possessing the amount of leisure which most Russians enjoy. Some of its volumes, however, are intended merely as works of reference, books which are not meant to be read through, but which, serve as useful storehouses of facts and figures. Of such a nature is the huge collection now before us of Pistsovuiya knigi, the rent-rolls, as it were, of the estates of ecclesiastical and lay proprietors of the soil in the sixteenth century. Some idea of the magnitude of the work may be gained from the fact that the second part alone of its first volume contains 1,598 large and closely printed pages. As a general rule, the publications of the Society are of no use to foreigners who are unacquainted with Russian. But there are a few exceptions, such as the monograph by Prof. Oswald Heer, of Zurich, on the fossil flora of the coal-fields of East Siberia. In 1859 a rich collection of fossil plants was made in the Amur district by F. Schmidt, but it was burnt in the great fire of Blagoveshensk the year after. In 1862 a fresh collection was made, and submitted to Prof. Heer. The results of his investigations are given in the second division of “the geological part” of the third volume of “the physical section” of the Records (Trudi) of the “Siberian Expedition” of the Society, under the title of the “Jurassic Flora of the Irkutsk Government and the Amur Territory.” The greater part of the text is in Russian. But as the descriptions are in Latin, and they are accompanied by thirty-one quarto plates, printed at Winterthur, the book is available for Western scholars. The expedition of the late A. Tchekanovsky to the Lena in 1875, says the editor, F. Schmidt, in his preface, has contributed new and important additions to our knowledge of the Jurassic flora of Siberia. “The Jurassic plants collected around Bulun and Ayakit, Lower Lena, serve as a link between the Jurassic flora of South-East Siberia and the same flora of the Spitzbergen Isles, and prove the unity and comparative uniformity of the Jurassic flora over a great part of the northern hemisphere, namely from Spitzbergen to England (Yorkshire) and beyond the Lena to the Irkutsk Government and the Amur.” Much valuable information about Siberia is given also in the voluminous supplements to Ritter's “Asia,” “serving as a continuation of Ritter's work, based upon materials rendered available since 1832.”
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The Russian Geographical Society . Nature 21, 522–523 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/021522a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/021522a0