Abstract
THE great Constantine Medal was awarded this year by the Russian Geographical Society to Prof. Romanovsky for his geological work in Russian Turkestan. For more than five years the learned Professor explored various parts of Turkestan, and thus laid the first foundations for the geological knowledge of this region. His first work, “Materials for the Geology of Turkestan,” was published in 1876, and it contained the description of eighty-eight species of fossil animals (of which thirty-four were new species) and fourteen species of plants belonging to the Carboniferous, Triassic, Jurassic, and Chalk deposits of Turkestan; the Silurian and Devonian deposits of the region being so greatly metamorphosed as to have most of their fossils destroyed. This first work was soon followed by papers contributed to the Verhandlungen of the St. Petersburg Mineralogical Society, in which papers Prof. Romanovsky described the fossils of the Ferghana deposits (Upper Chalk, characterized by their richness in Oslreæ, some of which belong to new genera), and the Sarvadan brown-coals, which contain the new lizard Brontozoum tianschanicum, and are of the same age as the Connecticut Trias Sandstone. The second part of the “Materials for the Geology of Turkestan,” published by Prof. Romanovsky, contains the description of all the pal Deontological collections gathered in Turkestan by MM. Mushketoff, Syevertsoff, Barbot-de-Marny, and Okladnykh; and no less than 144 species of fossils (of which forty-nine are new) have been described in this second instalment of the “Materials.” It was precisely the palttontological work of Prof. Romanovsky which enabled M. Mushketoff to arrive at the remarkable general conclusions as to the great features of the geology of Turkestan, which are embodied in his capital work, “Turkestan,” and which rendered it possible for both geologists to draw up the geological map which illustrates it.
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Geographical Notes . Nature 39, 42 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/039042b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/039042b0