considered as a square plain, containing about 40 degrees
of longitude, and 20 of latitude, that is, between the 47 deg. and 67 deg.
degrees. The east side is bounded by the Oural mountains, running in a
straight line from north to south. The west is bounded by Poland. The
south reaches to the Caspian and Black Seas, as does the north to the
Polar Ocean.

The greatest part of the water which falls upon this extensive country
is delivered into the Caspian by the river Wolga; and this water runs
from the east and west sides, gathered in two great rivers, the Kama and
the Oka. The water thus gathered from the two opposite extremities of
this great kingdom meet in the middle with the Wolga, which receives its
water from the north side. We thus find the water of this great plain
running in all directions to its centre. Had this been the lowest place,
here would have been formed a sea or lake. But this water found a lower
place in the bed of the Caspian; and into this bason it has made its
way, in forming to itself a channel in the great plain of the Wolga.

Our present purpose is to show that this channel, which the Wolga
has cut for itself, had been once a continued mass of solid rock and
horizontal strata, which in the course of time has been hollowed out to
form a channel for those waters. These waters have been traversing all
that plain, and have left protuberances as so many testimonies of what
had before existed; for, we here find the horizontal strata cut down and
worn away by the rivers.

M. Pallas gives us very good reason to believe that the Caspian Sea had
formerly occupied a much greater extent than at present; there are the
marks of its ancient banks; and the shells peculiar to the Caspian Sea
are found in the soil of that part of its ancient bottom which it has
now deserted, and which forms the low saline _Steppe_. He also makes it
extremely probable that the Caspian then communicated with the Euxine or
Black Sea, and that the breaking through of the channel from the Euxine
into the Mediterranean had occasioned the disjunction of those seas
which had been before united, as the surface of the Caspian is lowered
by the great evaporation from that sea surrounded with dry deserts.

However that may he, it is plain, that throughout all this great flat
inland country of Russia, the solid rocks are decaying and wearing away
by the operation of water, as certainly, though perhaps not so rapidly,
as in the more moun