Abstract
M. KARELIN, who died in 1872, in the province of Orenburg, to which he was exiled in 1824, was well known to naturalists in Russia and Western Europe as an indefatigable collector in mineralogy, botany, and zoology, who supplied Russian and foreign museums with rich collections from Eastern Russia and Siberia. But, with the exception of a few papers in botany and zoology, none of his most valuable works have appeared in print. Most of his manuscripts are lost, and of his remarkable journey to the Altaï and Sayan, where he spent several years making his richest collections, only a few fragments of diaries have been discovered. Prof. Bogdanoff publishes now the two diaries that Karelin kept during his journeys to the eastern coasts of the Caspian Sea, performed in small vessels in 1832 and 1836. During the first of these voyages Karelin visited the north-eastern coast and the Gulf of Mertvyi Kultuk; four years later he visited the Gulfs of Astrabad, Krasnovodsk, Kara-Bugaz, &c., and penetrated also into the country, making an excursion into the Astrabad province, and another to the great Balkhan Mountains, where he entered into communication with the Turkomans. All these tracts have been visited and described since, but still the reading of Karelin's diary, which shows a fine observer of the physical characters of the countries visited, and of the people met with, is a real pleasure; while numerous remarks on the flora and fauna, scattered in the diaries, have lost very little, or nothing, of their interest from the more recent descriptions. Both diaries are followed by most valuable general descriptions of the flora and fauna of the shores of the Caspian; the lists of species met with, altogether exactly determined, have been revised by Prof. Strauch and M. Gobi, thanks to the numerous collections he made during his journeys. His remarks on the old bed of the Amu-daria, which he visited and mapped in 1836 as far as 37° E. long., are fully confirmed by recent researches; whilst his descriptions of the nature and inhabitants of the province of Astrabad and of the Turkoman coast, and his remarks on the falling of level of the Caspian, are still as valuable as if they were written today. The work is accompanied with maps of the Gulfs of Astrabad, Hassankuli, and Krasnovodsk, and of the Balkhan Mountains, which enable us to conclude as to the changes in the configuration of the coast line during the last fifty years.
Voyages of G. S. Karelin on the Caspian Sea.
Memoirs of the Russian Geographical Society; Section of Physical Geography, vol. x. 497 pp. (St. Petersburg, 1883.)
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Voyages of G. S. Karelin on the Caspian Sea . Nature 28, 611 (1883). https://doi.org/10.1038/028611c0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/028611c0