September 22, 2016 marks the 275th anniversary of the birth of the remarkable scientist and traveler, member of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811). Already during his lifetime, he gained enormous international fame thanks to his scientific works in various fields of science, as well as two large travels across the vast expanses of the Russian Empire.

Nevertheless, there is one sad paradox associated with Pallas. On the one hand, his name can be easily found in many encyclopedias or reference books, and many articles and even books have been written about the scientist. However, on the other hand, even in scientific circles little is known about him, and often they have not heard anything. Meanwhile, historians of science sometimes compare Pallas with Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, a symbol of our science in the second half of the 18th century, not without reason believing that Peter Pallas was an iconic figure of our Academy of Sciences in the last third of the Enlightenment century.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, many prominent scientists in Russia and abroad spoke enthusiastically about Pallas’s contribution to science. I will only mention the names of the French zoologist and historian of science Georges Cuvier, the German traveler and naturalist Alexander Humboldt, one of the founders of Russian ecology and zoogeography, Nikolai Alekseevich Severtsov. However, today many members of the Russian Academy of Sciences have (if they have) a very vague idea of ​​their great predecessor. A whole series of works by Pallas are considered fundamental, and what is written in them is now practically unknown to most, since they have not been translated into Russian.

The path to science

The future “academicus” was born in Berlin into a wealthy family of a military surgeon-professor. The mother came from the French Huguenot diaspora. Germany did not yet exist as a single country. Berlin was the capital of the ambitious and warlike Kingdom of Prussia, dominated by the Brandenburg Hohenzollern dynasty.

Peter was the third and last child. He received a good education at home, which consisted of learning languages. As a result, the boy mastered, in addition to his native German and French (his mother’s language), Latin, as well as ancient Greek and English, which were not in fashion at that time. At the age of 13, the father sent the child to the Berlin Medical-Surgical College, which was distinguished by its advanced views on medicine and natural science. In its likeness, the Medical-Surgical Academy was later created in Russia in St. Petersburg and Moscow (now the Military Medical Academy).

In the 1760s, Pallas lived in England and the Netherlands, where he met many famous collectors and naturalists. He visited famous botanical gardens and studied the richest collections of “naturalia,” as natural objects were then called. At the same time, Peter decided to abandon his medical career and take up the natural sciences, which did not find support from his father.

Thanks to useful contacts with influential people, as well as his own knowledge, Pallas was elected a member of the Royal Society of London in June 1764, and in November of the same year - a member of the Kaiser's Leopoldino-Carolina Academy of Naturalists ("Leopoldina" for short). The selection of such a young naturalist, who was not even 23 years old, was, of course, an unheard of honor, especially considering his lack of published work (not counting his dissertation).

Nevertheless, such a generous advance turned out to be justified. In 1766, in The Hague, Pallas published two monographs at once. In the first of them ( Elenchus Zoophytorum) he gave a description of the then mysterious zoophytes(“animal-plants”), that is, creatures attached to the ground (sponges, coral polyps, bryozoans), confirming their belonging to animals. The young naturalist, having shown that there is no such fundamental boundary between plants and animals as the majority thought then, contrasted the kingdom of living organisms with minerals. This idea was highly appreciated by V.I. Vernadsky in his book on living matter in the 1920s.

Another book ( Miscellanea Zoologica) contained descriptions of a wide variety of animals, from antelopes to lower creatures. In it, by the way, Pallas was the first to identify guinea pigs as a separate genus Cavia. In the Netherlands, a novice but already famous naturalist dreamed of a distant expedition to one of the Dutch colonies: to the very south of Africa or to the east to Asia. However, his dreams were interrupted by his father, who called his son home.

A conflict was brewing in the family. Peter was completely financially dependent on his father, but did not want to become a doctor. An unexpected offer came from Russia. On behalf of Catherine II, Pallas Jr. was invited to work in St. Petersburg, the capital of a huge empire. He was promised a position as a full member and professor of natural sciences at the Imperial Academy of Sciences, as well as leadership of a large expedition to Siberia. After hesitating, Pallas accepted the invitation and already in the summer of 1767 he sat at the Academy of Sciences. Pallas came to St. Petersburg not alone, but with a young woman, whose name remains unknown. She later became his wife and they had a daughter.

Travel around Russia

In the summer of 1768, Pallas, at the head of a detachment of seven people, left St. Petersburg, setting off on a long journey deep into a vast unknown country. He passed through the Volga region, the Urals, the Northern Caspian region, Western Siberia and reached Transbaikalia (Dauria) in the east. His detachment was part of the so-called “physical” expeditions, which became one of the most glorious pages in the history of Russian science. According to the official instructions, in addition to “natural history,” it was necessary to describe the geography of the region being visited, its natural resources, economy, history and customs of local peoples. In fact, these were complex expeditions with an unusually wide range of tasks, from physical and economic geography to traditional medicine and beliefs.

The expedition was not easy. On July 30 (August 10), 1774, having endured many trials, tribulations and hardships of a difficult nomadic life, having suffered losses among his subordinates, the 33-year-old naturalist returned to the banks of the Neva. He looked like a half-old man, emaciated by illness, with graying hair.

During his long travels, Palace kept a detailed diary, which he sent in parts to the Academy of Sciences. This diary was published under the title "Travel through the Various Provinces of the Russian Empire" in St. Petersburg in German (1771–1776) and then in Russian (1773–1788) in three parts and five books. This work, amazing in its breadth, was reprinted in different languages ​​more than 20 times, putting its author among the outstanding European scientists.

In fact, Pallas created a grandiose panorama of a huge, diverse and then little-studied country, outlining its diverse nature and numerous peoples from the Baltic to Transbaikalia and from the polar tundra to the Caspian desert. “Journey” became a real encyclopedia of Russia in the second half of the 18th century. It attracted the attention not only of various scientists (from botanists to orientalists), but also of such wonderful writers and poets as Nikolai Gogol (during his preparation of “Dead Souls”) and Osip Mandelstam. Over the years, the scientific and historical value of this extensive work of Pallas only increases, since the information he obtained about nature and population allows, when compared with modern data, to evaluate the changes that have occurred over the past centuries.

Empress's Grace

After the expedition, Pallas lived in St. Petersburg for almost twenty years, leading the measured life of a scientist and carrying out various assignments for the Imperial Academy of Sciences and other departments of the Russian Empire. He wrote numerous articles and books, edited the works of his colleagues, attended academic and other meetings, conducted extensive correspondence with Russian and foreign scientists, published Neue Nordische Beyträge(1781–1796), etc.

It should be noted his numerous voluminous books on ethnography, zoology, botany, entomology, “Comparative dictionaries of all languages ​​and dialects,” etc. In 1777, the academician put forward his concept of the structure and formation of mountains and changes on the globe. In 1780, he gave a public speech at the Imperial Academy of Sciences on the variability of animals, refuting the concept of Carl Linnaeus about the hybridization of species and the views of the no less famous Georges Buffon on the influence of climate.

Gradually Pallas became an increasingly important figure, whose influence extended beyond the boundaries of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Thanks to the patronage of Catherine II, he was received at court, taught natural sciences to her grandchildren Alexander (the future Emperor Alexander I) and Constantine, and was appointed historiographer of the Admiralty College.

However, the empress’s mercy did not last forever, and Pallas’s court ill-wishers did not sleep. In the fall of 1792, he was released from business by the Admiralty Board and received the highest permission to travel to Crimea, annexed to Russia in 1783. In fact, he was sent into distant exile with honor. Although various reasons for disgrace are given, its real reason is unknown.

Pallas made his second great journey in 1793–1794 at his own expense. The winter route passed through Moscow and the Volga to the south of Russia through the Caspian Sea to the Crimea. He was traveling in a wagon with his third wife, Karolina Ivanovna, and his daughter, Albertina, from his first marriage.

In 1795, in St. Petersburg, a brief description of the Crimean Peninsula appeared in French and Russian, compiled by Pallas on behalf of the young favorite of the Empress, Count Platon Zubov. In one decade (1796–1806), 11 reprints of Taurida followed in German and French. This was probably explained not just by curiosity, but also by geopolitical interests. Soon, a two-volume description of Pallas’s own journey “through the southern governorates of the Russian state” appeared in German in Leipzig (1799–1801), which was also reprinted several times in Europe.

Catherine II generously endowed the academician with lands and a house in Crimea near Simferopol. Here Pallas lived for about 15 years (1795–1810), successfully combining the life of a landowner and a scientist. In addition to gardening and viticulture, he compiled another botanical monograph and completed the main scientific work of his life Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica(“Russian-Asian Zoography”). Its three volumes, printed in Latin in St. Petersburg (1811 and 1814), contained descriptions of 874 species of vertebrate animals.

In April 1810, the aged scientist returned to Berlin with his widowed daughter and grandson. The wife remained in Crimea. On September 8, 1811, the great naturalist died of chronic enteritis, which he suffered all his life (just two weeks short of his 70th birthday). He was buried in the Jerusalem Cemetery in Berlin.

Pallas's legacy

Pallas's scientific legacy is enormous. If you do not take into account reprints, then in 51 years (1760–1811) he wrote 20 books and 131 articles, edited many manuscripts, and also translated 1 book and 7 articles. The scientist was most productive in St. Petersburg from 1776 to 1789.

If we sort his works by area, it turns out that the researcher made contributions to at least 14 sciences. In addition to zoology and botany, these are geography, geology, paleontology, ethnography, oriental studies, religious studies (Buddhology), history and archaeology. The scientist also owns published works on linguistics, numismatics, archeology, meteorology, medicine, agriculture and forestry, mining, various crafts and technologies.

A large block of ironstone (687 kg) brought by Pallas from Siberia, known as Pallas iron, turned out to be the first celestial body identified by science. The beginning of scientific meteoritics is associated with the study of this “aerolith” (then term), and meteorites of this type were called pallasites.

In 1895, naturalist and bibliographer Fyodor Petrovich Koeppen (1833–1908), who compiled a detailed list of Pallas’s works and outlined his biography, proposed staging monument to this wonderful scientist, and also publish it in the Academy of Sciences complete collection of his works. In 1904, a railway station in the steppe Lower Volga region on the line leading to Astrakhan was given the name Pallasovka(city since 1967). In Soviet times, the only monument in the world to a scientist and traveler appeared there.

It would seem that the country should be proud of such a great researcher. However, the 275th anniversary of the birth of Pallas in Russia is unlikely to be celebrated at a high official level; at least, the decisions of the Russian Academy of Sciences on this topic are unknown to me and my colleagues. Despite the obvious lack of interest at the top, enthusiasts will, of course, hold a series of Pallas meetings in the regions. On September 22 in Berlin, German and Russian colleagues living in Germany plan to lay flowers at the grave of the outstanding scientist who unites both our countries.

Of course, the lack of interest and understanding of the importance of Pallas in the leadership of science, as well as in government bodies, is very disappointing. I am glad that his name is remembered and proud of by scientists, local historians and teachers in various cities and villages of our vast homeland, especially in those areas where the expeditions of Pyotr Semyonovich Pallas took place. It is also encouraging that, thanks to the modest provincial intelligentsia, his legacy is being studied in schools and local museums.

The wise Vernadsky spoke of Pallas’s works in the following way: “They still lie at the basis of our knowledge about the nature and people of Russia. Geologist and ethnographer, zoologist and botanist, geologist and mineralogist, statistician, archaeologist and linguist inevitably turn to them as a living source.<...>. Pallas has not yet occupied in our consciousness the historical place that corresponds to his real significance.”

I would like both the leaders of science and the authorities at its various levels to understand this.

Borkin L. Ya., Hannibal B. K., Golubev A. V. The roads of Peter Simon Pallas (in the west of Kazakhstan). St. Petersburg; Uralsk: Eurasian Union of Scientists, 2014; Sytin A.K. Botanist Peter Simon Pallas. M.: T-vo scientific publications KMK, 2014; Wendland F. Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811). Materialien einer Biographie. Teil I. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992. XVIII. 1176 S. (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Komission zu Berlin, Bd. 80/I-II); Borkin L. Ya. Additions to the bibliography of Peter Simon Pallas // Historical and biological studies. SPb., 2011. T. 3, No. 3. P. 130–157.

Sytin A.K. Living geography of Russia: N.V. Gogol studies the natural history works of P.S. Pallas // Nature. 2000. No. 6. P. 93–96; Borkin L. Ya. Osip Mandelstam and P. S. Pallas (afterword) // Spring of knowledge. SPb. 2013. No. 1 (8). pp. 31–33.

At the age of 26, he was appointed head of the enormous descriptive work that the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, in accordance with the Decree of Empress Catherine II, began to carry out in the eastern regions of the state in 1768. Subsequently, the scientific activity of the young professor at the University of Berlin was connected with Russia for more than 40 years. In our scientific community, in the Russian manner, they very soon began to call him simply Pyotr Semenovich. And since different images of Peter Pallas now appear in the scientific literature, here we present two versions of his portrait (Fig. 1, 2).

By decree of the Empress

By the middle of the 18th century, the borders of the Russian Empire had advanced far beyond the Ural Range - into Siberia and the Far East. The Volga fortress of Samara, once founded as a border settlement, at this time had already lost its guard significance, as local nomadic tribes either switched to a sedentary lifestyle or migrated far into the Kyrgyz steppes. Therefore, then the Russian government was faced with the urgent task of studying and developing the richest natural resources of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia.

The study of the natural resources of the Middle Volga region began under Peter I, by whose decree in 1720 a detachment was sent “to compose land maps” to the Astrakhan province. At that time it also included the territory of the modern Samara region. As already mentioned, at that time the Emperor entrusted this work to the Chief Secretary of the Senate Ivan Kirilov, a serious scientist and the largest organizer of science.

Since 1734, all disparate research groups were united under the name of the Orenburg Physical Expedition, and its headquarters at the same time was located in Samara. After the death of Kirilov, research in the Middle Volga region was led by Vasily Tatishchev, but after his departure to Astrakhan in 1741, all expeditionary work was quickly curtailed.

The study of the eastern regions of Russia resumed only after the accession to the Russian throne in 1762 of the young and ambitious Empress Catherine II. Then the Academy of Sciences was again tasked with studying the Trans-Volga region, the steppe spaces of which the government considered very promising for the development of grain farming and cattle breeding here. However, the data from the first Orenburg expedition in this regard turned out to be quite scarce. In fact, the southeastern provinces of the European part of Russia, even in the middle of the 18th century, still remained a real “blank spot” in geographical science.

According to the decree of Catherine II, the Second Orenburg Physical Expedition was called upon to erase this stain, which began fulfilling the government’s task in June 1768, and over the next six years its troops did a tremendous job of describing the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia (to the source of the Amur). As mentioned above, its work was supervised by 26-year-old Berlin University professor Peter Simon Pallas.

Natural scientist

He was born in Berlin on September 22, 1741 in the family of the German physician Simon Pallas (1694-1770), professor of anatomy and chief surgeon of the Berlin Medical-Surgical College (now the Charite Clinic). His father was from East Prussia. His mother, Susanna Lienard, came from an old Protestant family of emigrants from the French city of Metz. Peter Pallas had an older brother and sister. All of them lived during the reign of the enlightened monarch Frederick II, who reorganized the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

Peter Simon's father wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, but he became interested in natural science. Studying with private teachers, already at the age of 13 he knew English, French, Latin and Greek perfectly and began attending lectures at the Berlin Medical-Surgical College, where he studied anatomy, physiology, obstetrics, surgery and, along with them, botany and zoology.

Peter continued his studies at the University of Halle (1758-1759) and the University of Göttingen (1759-1760), where he completed courses in pedagogy, philosophy, mining, zoology, botany (according to the system of Carl Linnaeus), agriculture, mathematics and physics. In 1760, Pallas moved to Leiden University, where at the age of 19 he defended his doctoral dissertation in medicine on intestinal worms in humans and some animals (Latin title “De infestis veventibus intra viventia” - “On pests living inside organisms”). Pallas then put in order the natural history collections in Leiden, after which he visited England to study the botanical and zoological collections. In 1762 he returned to Berlin. The following year, with the permission of his parents, Pallas went to Holland to find a suitable job, but despite his intensive scientific studies, he did not succeed.

Nevertheless, the first scientific works of Peter Pallas were published in Holland in 1766 - “Elenchus zoophytorum” (Latin) (The Hague, 1766) and “Miscellanea zoologica” (Latin) (The Hague, 1766). Both works were devoted to the anatomy and taxonomy of lower animals and included descriptions of several new species for that time.

Pallas also made significant changes to Linnaean classification of worms. The scientist abandoned the “ladder of creatures,” the idea of ​​which dates back to Aristotle, but was especially widespread among naturalists in the 18th century. He also expressed ideas about the historical development of the organic world, and proposed to graphically arrange the sequential connections of the main taxonomic groups of organisms in the form of a family tree with branches. Thanks to these works, which revealed Pallas' observation and insight, he quickly became famous among European biologists. His new system of animal classification was praised by Georges Cuvier. Subsequently, with the establishment of the idea of ​​evolution in biology, Pallas's scheme became the basis of systematics. For his work, the scientist was elected in 1764 as a member of the Royal Society of London and the Academy in Rome.

During these years, Pallas dreamed of traveling to South Africa and South and Southeast Asia, but due to his father's opposition, he was never able to carry out these plans. As a result, in 1766, the young researcher returned to Berlin again, where he began working on “Spicilegia zoologica” (Latin) (Berlin, 1767-1804, in 2 volumes).

Pallas's fate changed dramatically after December 22, 1766, when the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences elected him as a full member and professor of natural history. After this, he received an invitation to lead an extensive expedition to study the natural resources of the Russian Empire. So on July 30, 1767, already having a doctorate, a professorship and recognition in Europe, Pallas, together with his young wife and young daughter, arrived in St. Petersburg, where he immediately received the position of adjunct of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and the rank of collegiate assessor (corresponding to the army rank of major). The Academy of Sciences gave Pallas a salary of 800 rubles a year, which was a high salary at that time.

Orenburg Physical Expedition

Looking ahead, it must be said that the result of the activities of the Second Orenburg Physical Expedition was the five-volume work of Peter Pallas “Journey through the Various Provinces of the Russian Empire” (Fig. 3, 4).

In total, several parties took part in its work, following independent routes. Two of them (under the leadership of Ivan Lepekhin and Johann Falk), just like Pallas’s group, also worked in our region for quite a long time. At the same time, the main detachment, under the leadership of Pallas himself, passed through the territory of the modern Samara region in two sections of the route. First, he walked along its northern part (September - October 1768), and then, after wintering in Simbirsk, along the river bank and along the Volga ice he reached Samara.

In the same 1768, the group of Professor Ivan Lepekhin (Fig. 5),
which included the young scientist Pyotr Rychkov, for the first time walked from the headwaters to the mouth of the Sok River, and also examined the Bolshoi Cheremshan River. Lepekhin in his writings gave a brief description of the Sokoli Mountains, rising on the left bank of the Sok, while quite correctly considering them to be a continuation of the Sok Yars, stretching along the river to the northeast (Fig. 6).

As for the detachment led by the Swedish professor Johann Peter Falk, he joined the expedition later - only in the fall of 1769. At the first stage, his group crossed the central part of the Volga Upland (the territory of modern Syzran and Shigonsky districts of the Samara region), and then headed towards Siberia and Central Asia, where a huge amount of scientific material was also collected.

Unfortunately, at the final stage of the expedition, while traveling through the territory of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, Johann Falk became addicted to smoking opium in order to study local customs. His addiction to the drug progressed, and the scientist needed increasing doses of this potion every month. As a result, in March 1774, when his detachment arrived in Kazan on the way back to the capital, Johann Falk shot himself, being in a state of extreme depression. He was only 42 years old at that time. Falk’s portrait has not been preserved in the archives, and therefore we are not able to present it here.

But we now read the notes of Peter Pallas and Ivan Lepekhin as the most interesting documents telling about the nature and population of Russia as they were two and a half centuries ago.

In particular, Pallas's detachment for the first time compiled a detailed scientific description of a vast region in the north of the modern Samara region, stretching on both sides of the Sok River. In these places, back in 1703, near the local sulfur springs, by order of Emperor Peter I, the Sergievsky plant was founded, and with it the suburb of Sergievsk (Fig. 7).
Later, in 1717, the springs were examined by physician Gottlieb Schober, who came from the capital, and highly appreciated the healing properties of the local waters.

Now, as you know, the famous resort of Sergievsky Mineral Waters is located on this site. But in the middle of the 18th century, official geographical science had practically no other information about the north of the Samara Trans-Volga region. Therefore, a trip along the route along the Sok River was listed in Pallas’s plan as one of the most important.

On approximately October 10 or 11, 1768 (more precisely, the date is not specified), Pallas' expeditionary force, moving from the east, entered the territory of the modern Samara region in the area of ​​the village of Usmanovo (now Novoye Usmanovo, Kamyshlinsky district). The scientist wrote about this in his book: “Near the Soka River near the Tatar village of Usmanova, they cross the small river Kibit, or Akana, where small traces of ores appear. The same village is also called Nadyrova, or Nadyr-aul, after the name of foreman Nadyr Urasmetev, who died several years ago, who, by virtue of the permission given to him in 1756 from the Orenburg mining office in Ufa, intended to collect asphalt located in these places and make from it oil; and finally he actually began to build a plant at the top of the Kamyushli River; and another plant would have been built near Surgut: but this order was interrupted and completely destroyed by the death that happened to this Tatar.”

In these same places, Pallas was able to see a rare natural phenomenon - a place where pure petroleum products naturally emerge from the depths of the earth on the surface of the earth (Fig. 8).
About them he made the following entry in his book dated October 12, 1768: “The oil spring is located several miles from Semenov (now the villages of Staroye and Novoye Semenkino, Klyavlinsky district - V.E.) in the southeastern side ... on a place covered with rich black soil, according to to which the western main source of the Baitugan River flows. The key was somewhat distributed, and near the mountain they dug a small hole, like a cauldron, up to three feet wide and deep, into which the water flows without noticeable movement, and just as imperceptibly leaves into the flowing small river. And so, although the spring does not have a fast flow, it never freezes even in severe frosts, and if it is covered with snow, then the resinous vapors rising from it, the smell of which can be smelled deliberately far away, very soon make a hole through the snow; despite the fact that water does not have heat to an extreme degree; for the thermometer this morning in the cold weather showed 160 degrees in free air (Fahrenheit - V.E.), but in the water only 138 degrees. In a small hole in the spring, the surface of the water is covered with black, very sticky oil, which has the color and essence of thick resin, and although it is often scooped up, it collects again in a few days.”

The scientist noted that from time immemorial local residents have used the oil coming out of the ground as a good lubricant for their carts, as well as as a medicine: “The Chuvashans and Tatars living nearby use this resinous water not only for rinsing and drinking during thrush in the mouth and boils in throat, but they also carefully collect the oil itself, and use it in many cases as a home remedy. It is especially applied to fresh wounds, which then heal very quickly... Especially noteworthy is the internal use, namely: taking a full spoon of oil, boil it in milk, in which it is made into thick sour cream. They drink this warm during injections, or when their stomach hurts, thinking that this happened from strain and stress, as well as during secret illnesses. They say that a sick person becomes intoxicated, feels a strong fever, as one might think, and strongly flowing urine has a piercing oily smell.”

It should also be noted here that before Pallas, the scientific world and the capital’s authorities knew nothing about how widespread sulfur springs were in the Samara Trans-Volga region. It was believed that Sulfur Lake (Fig. 9),
described back in 1717 by Gottlieb Schober - the only similar reservoir in the east of the Russian Empire. Meanwhile, Pallas’s expedition, during its first survey of the Samara region, established that even in the Soka basin there could be dozens of such sources. They have been known to local residents from time immemorial.

“From Semenova, again, I was forced to drive a whole 15 versts to the southwestern side... to the Soka River, and to the Tatar village of Kamyushli (now the regional center of Kamyshla), standing next to the river of the same name... Here runs between the stones by the road a clear spring, in which the water is somewhat mixed with particles of flammable sulfur and lime, also has a deliberate sulfuric smell and flows through a low place in the Soka, leaving a small white sediment on the grass... The Tatars call this spring Kükert, which means flammable sulfur.”

Further on his way, Pallas described a similar spring near the village of Mikushkino (now the villages of Bolshoye and Maloe Mikushkino, Sergievsky district): “On the right bank of Chumbulat there are in a low place two sulfur swamps separated by a flat slope, and having their own flow into this river... The second... is a small lake up to 25 fathoms long, up to an eighth wide, and an arshin deep: the water in it is very sulfuric, leaves calcareous sulfur matter on the muddy bottom, and spreads a strong smell around it. In one lip of this small lake, and in the severe frosts of the non-freezing, there is a strong spring, and throwing out gray ash-like matter. Chuvashans and other residents use this and other sulfur waters described below with good success in baths to drive away scabs and other rashes on the body. It seems that these waters can serve excellently for external and internal use during all sorts of illnesses on the body, and perhaps internally they can provide considerable benefits in many long-term and almost incurable diseases.”

Pallas also described another sulfur spring (Fig. 10),
which was located near “another Tatar village, nicknamed Ermak” (now the village of Staroye Ermakovo, Kamyshlinsky district - V.E.). His expedition also passed “through the Moksha village of Alekseeva, or Vechkan (now the village of Staroe Vechkanovo), the village of Zaperkina, or Zaparova (now the village of Saperkino), the village of Ishtulkino (now the village of Maloye Ishutkino), and some others.

And, of course, Pallas’s detachment visited the suburb of Sergievsk (Fig. 11),
about which the researcher left the following note: “On the 15th of October, I went at dawn to Sulfur Lake, which lies five miles away in the south-east, in these places, the most famous, and exactly so-called... It’s scary to look at it, and it’s almost impossible to be with it for a long time , due to the rising smelly vapors of rotten eggs and flammable sulfur having a similar smell; and I myself have experienced that this smell is sensitive to the wind almost four miles from the lake. The movement of water in it is not visible, and it never freezes, because even now the water in it was almost 30 degrees warmer than the outside air... The water in it is so pure that one could easily measure its depth with simple eyes if the bottom were not covered mud and black matter. However, it seems that this lake is only a few arshins deep...

The bottom of the lake is all covered with such skin that can be compared to decayed animal skins. This skin, no thicker than one line, covers the black mud and everything that fell into the lake, and you can pull it out bit by bit. It is mostly dark green, and in some places dark yellow, a very unpleasant color. Excessively soft fibers are visible in it, for the most part extending in parallel, only passing through the surface and shiny, and its smoothness does not cover. I think to really attribute to this matter the property of a plant. But it is impossible for sulfuric water to settle to the bottom, because it would not have so much substance, stickiness, and such equal and thin thickness.” And further in the book follow the scientist’s reflections on how this lake was formed, and why the water and bottom sediments in it are saturated with sulfur (of course, from the point of view of 18th-century science). The scientist added to these records that the lake is continuously replenished with water from several sulfur springs, of which there are quite a lot in its vicinity (Fig. 12).

Not far from Sergievsk, travelers encountered a river with water of an unusual white color, which Pallas described in his notes as follows: “Rising on the eastern shore of Sulfur Lake... is a mountain stretching to the Surgut River. A small sulfur spring flows from it, flowing along a wooden chute (Fig. 13),
which still remains from the former sulfur plant... The water at the beginning of this canal covered with white matter is very clean, and having already passed up to 70 fathoms it gradually becomes whitish, like liquid whey, with which this river retains the color for a mile along its course, and communicates it to Surgut, into which it flowed in the place where the river flows more quietly in its depth, a floating white skin is visible on the surface of the water, the kind that usually appears on limewater.”

In the land of baptized Kalmyks

Already in the time of Pallas, metal ores valuable for industry were sometimes found in the High Trans-Volga region - in particular, iron and copper. But only a detachment of the Orenburg expedition, which visited the territory of the modern Samara region in 1768, gave these deposits the first scientific description. Pallas, in his book “Travels in Various Provinces of the Russian Empire,” pointed out the presence of traces of copper in the upper reaches of the Sheshma and Zay rivers, which now flow through the Klyavlinsky and Shentala regions. The scientist wrote that in the local sandstones “there was thin copper ore, usually containing a lot of sand and clay.”

The fact is that even under Peter I, as follows from the report in the first issue of the Vedomosti newspaper, they already tried to smelt copper from the same ore on the Sok River, but it was not possible to obtain an acceptable amount of metal from the local rocks. Modern research shows that the Soka sandstones actually contain little copper - from 2 to 15 thousandths of a percent. Practicing geologists evaluate such ore only as third-rate.

After examining the upper part of the Sok River basin, the expedition headed down its valley to the banks of the Volga. On this route, Pallas described Mount Sarzhat and another oil spring located not far from it - near the Shumbut river. Having proceeded without stopping through several villages, the expeditionary detachment arrived in Stavropol-on-Volga on October 17 (Fig. 14),
which greeted travelers with the first snow.

On the day of the arrival of the expeditionary party, only a little more than 30 years had passed from the official founding of this city, which, by decree of Empress Anna Ioannovna, was specially placed in this place for the residence of baptized Kalmyks. As Pallas was convinced, during this time the settlement was able to significantly increase in size and become a real administrative center of the new Kalmyk region: “The city of Stavropol (Fig. 15)
has a pleasant position on the eastern high bank of the Volga branch, which is called Kuneypoloshka (Kuneevskaya Volozhka - V.E.). On the land side, this place is surrounded by pleasant pine and birch ridges, and on the other side of the Volga, high limestone mountains are visible on the right bank, named Zhigulevsky after the village of Zhigulikha located between them. The middle part of the city is a fortress consisting of palisades, towers and one battery. There are two churches in it, one of which is wooden, and the other is stone, a well-built cathedral church; Moreover, good houses for the commandant and governor...; also the houses of Kalmyk chiefs and other government officials, a flour and salt store, a market and a school. In the upper part there are streets where garrison soldiers and Cossacks live; There is also a wooden church there, and another one is located in the merchant settlement built below the fortress. In general, the number of houses extends to four hundred and fifty.”

But simple Kalmyk cattle breeders (Fig. 16),
as Pallas noted, they still preferred to live not in the city, but in the open steppe, in portable yurts (Fig. 17),
without expressing any desire to move to Stavropol. This is evidenced by the following lines from his book: “They say that the number of baptized Kalmyks in the Stavropol district has now increased to fourteen thousand people, and among them there are up to a thousand Sungora families, who, upon the arrival of the Sungora uluses from the eastern steppe, immediately accepted the Christian faith. The sheep that these Kalmyks keep, and what their main wealth consists of, are mostly broad-tailed, and they brought them from the steppe; and so you can’t expect good wool from them. Russian sheep, released into their herds, also gradually degenerate, and receive the same shaggy wool as the Kalmyk ones... These people, who are already accustomed to the shepherd’s life [should] be encouraged to collect wool, for the places allocated for them for housing are already very convenient for maintaining sheep factories.”

From Stavropol, the expedition set off along the left bank of the Volga upstream in order to be able to cross to Simbirsk before the freeze-up began. Along this route, Pallas recorded the following interesting observations about the Volga fishery (Fig. 18):
“I don’t think that any river in Europe is as rich in fish as the Volga with all the rivers flowing in it... Beluga is often found in the Volga with a length of 20 to 25 spans (a span is about 20 centimeters - V.E.), and a weight there are from 30 to 45 poods. However, the number of small belugas with milk, which are eight spans long, is incomparably greater than the number of large caviar ones (Fig. 19).
Sturgeon are caught from five to eight spans in length, and weighing from 20 to 22 pounds... Both red and white fish range in size from three to five spans, and rarely weigh up to 30 pounds. Carp are sometimes up to seven spans long, which is why they weigh more, but they are caught in different sizes, and mostly small and medium-sized. Catfish (Fig. 20) Although they are smaller in size than belugas, they have been seen to be longer than ten spans, and several pounds heavy. For the most part, they are caught in the spring and autumn, and are known everywhere because with their quick desire they jump over the net, or tear it apart, and take other fish with them.”

Among the Zhiguli Mountains

The expeditionary force remained in Simbirsk for the entire winter, and departed from here along the left bank of the Volga towards Samara only on March 10 of the following year, 1769, as evidenced by lines from Pallas’s diary indicating the exact date of departure. In the Stavropol region, travelers crossed the still strong Volga ice to the right bank to the village of Morkvashi (Fig. 21).
Here Pallas left us quite extensive notes about the Zhiguli Mountains: “The ridge of limestone mountains, both the local shore and the highest part of the mountainous shore of the Volga, begins opposite Stavropol at the mouth of the Usa River. On these mountains there is forest everywhere, and their tops are usually covered with pine trees. From the river side, only bare stone walls and many different cracked stones are visible near these mountains, presenting a pleasant sight to the eye. On these rocky shores there are an indescribable number of birds of prey, which build nests there in the summer, and especially white eagles, or, in the local name, white-tailed eagles (Vultur albiсilla), and there are a lot of them. Sometimes falcons build nests here in mountain gorges; Also in the summer there are red ducks on the Volga, called cuttlefish (Anas rutila) (apparently, either goose or scorched duck - V.E.) (Fig. 22);
in the dense forest on the mountains there are often brown and black bears (Fig. 23),
and sometimes lynxes. Martens are rarely seen, on the contrary, there are even more whitish and deliberately large squirrels, whose furs can be honored first, excluding only the Isetian squirrels; They are also caught in the forests stretching up Samara, and in the upper countries of the Soka River.”

It is worth noting here that in the time of Pallas the fauna of the Zhiguli Mountains was much richer than it is now. Bears disappeared from these places at the end of the 19th century. Red ducks (sharpies), squirrels and martens, although still found here now, are very rare. The same can be said about the white-tailed eagle, which is now listed in the Red Book of Russia, and in our time its nesting sites on Samarskaya Luka can be literally counted on one hand.

The expedition made the further journey from Morkvasha towards Samara along the Volga ice, since the right bank turned out to be impassable for heavily loaded sleighs. On this route, Pallas examined the village of Shiryaevo (Fig. 24),
as well as the majestic Tsarev Kurgan located opposite it on the left bank of the Volga (Fig. 25).
Pallas wrote the following about him: “In that corner... there is on level ground an oblong-round, steep and sharp-topped hill, which has a circumference of about one and a half verst at the bottom, and a height of up to 20 fathoms. It is surrounded on both sides by the Sok River, which flows in a bend there, and on the western side by the congested Kurum River... They tell about it in various ways, but the following fable finally comes out: in ancient times, a large army marched across this country, the leader of which, in order to remember his great strength, ordered everyone the warrior should bring only one full cap of earth to this place; from which came the great heap that is now located... Others further increase this miracle, saying that the army went back the same way, and due to misfortune, so much of it disappeared that although each person was ordered to take back his former part of the land; however, this noble hill still remains.”

provincial town

To Samara (Fig. 26)
Pallas's detachment arrived on March 19, 1769, which he himself wrote about in a report letter to the Academy of Sciences. After this, for two weeks, zoologists and botanists of the expedition party compiled a description of the flora and fauna of our region, and Pallas noted the following in his diary: “Now I must briefly mention the city of Samara itself. The structure extends for the most part to the banks of the Volga, and occupies the corner between the Volga and the northern mouth of Samara. At first there was a wooden fortress in the city; but after it burned down in 1703, in 1704 a regular earthen fortress with defiles was built on the eastern side, between the Volga and Samara, on a low ridge, which is still visible today. The inhabitants of this city... get their livelihood from cattle breeding and from great trade (Fig. 27)
fresh and salted fish and caviar, for which they, both at the end of the year and in the spring after the ice has passed, travel in caravans across the steppe to Yaik, and sell their goods to other merchants from the northern and western countries who come there. To carry out this trade, a bridge is usually built in the spring across Samara, and to the main town of the Yaik Cossacks (Fig. 28)
a direct road was laid through the steppe with smelters or winter huts at a certain distance... Some Samara residents have their own fishing grounds on the Volga and in the steppe rivers Moche and Irgis, which they classify as part of the Samara district. In addition to the local cattle, there is a small trade in Kyrgyz and Kalmyk sheep, leather and lard. Apart from some tanneries and one mediocre yuft factory and a silk factory built outside the city, there are no other factories... In winter, trading Kasimov Tatars gather in Samara, who in advance, under Yaik, exchanged merlushkas from the Kyrgyz and Kalmyks, and brought here... Good merlushka sheepskin coats, in Russia those sold mostly come from here; At the same time, the local Kalmyks, who are given sheepskin paws for sewing, sew them first lengthwise, and then sew sheepskin coats from them, and usually sell them cheap.”

Pallas highly appreciated the surrounding Samara lands, which are promising for various types of agriculture: “The country near the city of Samara has a high, deliberately flat and gradually rising steppe... About 20 versts from Samara there is already high steppe everywhere with black soil on which grass grows almost as long as man's height, and in the spring it must be burned. In such places Samara Cossacks (Fig. 29)
have barnyards or farmsteads... The hills have such a good position, and partly such capable land, that nowhere in the Russian Empire can one find a better country for planting grapes... In these places, many other useful plants that require a warm climate could be planted with profit, and growing in the southern lands of Europe... Samara residents plant a lot of watermelon gardens, called melons, in the steppe on both sides of Samara. First, they fence off, and even then it’s bad, part of the land that they have plowed, they plant seeds, and they don’t worry about it anymore, except to water it in dry weather. When the watermelons ripen, the children are assigned as guards in the gardens. Since they have a great variety of watermelons, they are usually salted in the same way as cucumbers... Capsicums, of which much more are produced in Astrakhan, and are sold under the name red mustard, are sown here in the same way as cabbage seeds, in flat boxes placed on stilts ; but at the beginning of June, seedlings are planted on beds prepared in the garden, and watered until they come into force.”

In the rivers near our city, Pallas was for the first time able to see entire colonies of muskrats - now a very rare animal listed in the Red Book of Russia (Fig. 30).
On this subject, his book contains the following lines: “Near Samara, there are also muskrats (Sorex moschatus) in the lakes down the river [Mr. Linnaeus, for his benefit, decided to classify these animals as beavers; but by all indications they are nothing more than water rats]. But the higher you go up the river, the fewer of them there are, and along the Yaik River there are none at all, although along the Volga to the northern side all the way to the Oka there are much more of them than other animals. For the most part, muskrats are caught in the fall and spring using tops and edges, and at that they are suffocated, although their internal parts can remain in the water for a long time. These animals make holes for themselves in the high banks under the water; however, in such a way that the exit is directed upwards obliquely, and so their nest is dry. Consequently, in winter they do not have any other air in their burrows except underground air. On the contrary, as soon as the ice has passed, they often come to the surface of the water and play in the sun... The muskrat feeds on worms, and especially on leeches, which it pulls out of the mud with incredible speed, which the extremely sensitive and nerve-filled proboscis with which it turns in every possible way, this is the best organ of this animal; for his eyes are even smaller than those of a mole, and his ears are overgrown with hair. It is often heard that they, just like ducks, alkali in water, and take the said proboscis into their mouth. If they are teased, they squeak like a mouse and bite dangerously... The spirit of the beaver stream, produced from the matter under the skin in the glands of the tail, is even much more penetrating and long-lasting than from the real and best beaver stream.”

Through Samara Luka

Having stayed in Samara for almost a month and a half, and having become very thoroughly familiar with the nature of its surroundings, Pallas’s detachment set off across the entire Samara Luka towards Syzran. From our city, on May 3, 1769, the expedition crossed to the village of Rozhdestveno, about which the scientist’s academic work says this: “Rozhestveno stands on level ground near Voloshka, and is surrounded on one side by Voloshka and the Volga itself, and on the west side by the wooded Shelekhmet mountains. The land of this plain, like the rocky and high shores, consists of thin sandy and clayey layers, between which there are strips of black soil; from which it is clear that this foundation rose from the alluvial water of the earth from the neighboring mountains. The top layer of black soil is now not yet thicker than a foot; however, on this land even in dry years a fair amount of bread will be born; on the contrary, further to the mountains near Shelekhmet there is also a shortage of crops on clay soil in wet years.”

In the Mordovian village of Shelekhmet (Fig. 31)
The scientists of the expedition witnessed wedding celebrations, which is why the detachment stayed here for a long time. Impressed by what he saw, Pallas wrote in his diary: “In the Moksha village of Shelekhmet, I had the opportunity to see a Mordovian wedding. The following was worthy of note: how soon the bride from the village of Rozhestvina, to which Shelekhmet belongs to the churchyard, came back with a matchmaker in a wagon, which was covered with canvas; Then the groomsmen and groomsmen, with the bride’s continuous screams, took her out of the wagon and carried her to the very gate; Moreover, the entire female gender gathered from the village congratulated the bride, standing between the groomsmen and matchmakers. Then the mother came with a frying pan filled with dry hops, which she lit with a burning torch, and put the frying pan to the bride’s right foot, and she pushed the frying pan away from herself with her foot. This was done three times, and each time the scattered hops were raked into the frying pan. In this case, it is noted that if the frying pan falls backwards, that is, bottom up, then it foreshadows any misfortune for the young; if it turns upside down, then they consider this to be a happy omen, which is what has now happened. After which, those who had already gone, already amused, joyfully shouted: “Serve beer,” which was brought to them in the brother’s house even before the bride entered the house; and the bride had to put several clean rings into it, of which she had many strung on her fingers. They waited a few more times to perform other ceremonies; but there seemed to be nothing to see. Afterwards they told me that first of all they were distributing sinful porridge to those gathered from the entire village, old and young. Each of them is given a chumichka, and it is placed in one’s hat, and in another’s on the floor, or wherever he wants.”

Then the expeditionary party arrived in the village of Askulu (Fig. 32),
located 20 miles from Shelekhmeti, and here Pallas spent a lot of time inspecting the local sand deposits, where, as he concluded, raw materials of very high quality lie: “Open hills appeared towards the large village of Askule, constituting a very rich arable land... Upon leaving On the side of the mountain ridge from Askula there is a hole deep in the ground, in which all sorts of boulders are visible from above... and at the very bottom there is a layer of fine, clean, white quartz sand; and it seems that this sand is suitable for various mechanical uses and in glass factories. In the village of Yermachikha, located several miles from Askula on the Volga, Samara residents take the same sand, but only finer, for cleaning tin utensils.”

The detachment stopped for the night in the village of Sosnovy Solonets. Its name, as Pallas noted, comes from the local brackish clay, which “cattle readily eat.” The next day, the entire expedition group reached the village of Valovka (now the village of Vali, Stavropol region), which “is named after the vast, vast, and , as they say, the Tatar trench, consisting of three ramparts with ditches, and having several miles in circumference. There are no traces of a structure in this trench; however, while plowing, sometimes Tatar bricks come across, and then, perhaps, from graves located in the ground.” Nowadays this archaeological monument of the Bulgarian kingdom is called the Murom town.

After Shafts, Pallas’s detachment drove through the village of Staraya Ryazan (now Bolshaya Ryazan, Stavropol region), and reached the village of Perevoloki (Fig. 33),
where Volga robbers from time immemorial dragged their boats from the Volga to Usa and back. The visit to the village is evidenced by the following entry in Pallas’s book: “The large village of Perevoloka stands on the high rocky stone bank of the Volga, and moreover, in a place where from this river to Usa is considered to be less than a mile, and boats were previously dragged across this distance to shorten the path , why this place was named... At Perevoloka, layers consisting of small twisted snails, no larger than poppy seeds, are visible in the limestone flask. There are also imprints of fossilized things, which are very rarely found throughout the entire range of these limestone mountains. Also, in places, large and small flints are visible in the limestone flask, including half of the transparent agates.”

Further, the group’s path passed through the Pecherskaya Sloboda and the village of Kostychi, after passing through which the expedition arrived at the city of Syzran, which at that time was a county town in the Simbirsk province (Fig. 34).
Pallas wrote down that “that same evening (May 6 – V.E.) I arrived in Syzran (Fig. 35).
Most of the city is located on a cheerful mountainous place in the northern corner between the Krymsoy and Syzranka rivers, which connected there. From this mountainous place a vast valley stretches towards the Volga, which is mostly covered by spring water. A small part of the city with a well-built monastery is located on the southern bank of the Syzranka (Fig. 36),
and another humble monastery stands on the low bank of the Crimea. A collapsed wooden fortress with a stone cathedral church and an office building occupies the highest place on the banks of the Syzranka, and in addition to the wall cut down from logs, it is also surrounded by an embankment with a mediocre moat. There are few industries in this city, which is why there are few sufficient residents, but there are good apple orchards, and in general in this city they try more to grow them than in other places in the Russian Empire.”

"Slate coal"

In the vicinity of Syzran, Pallas was very interested in the outcrops of layers of oil shale (in those days it was called “stone” or “slate coal”) (Fig. 37).
In order to study this deposit, his detachment had to make a significant detour on its way, about which Pallas wrote as follows: “Then they told me that there was coal near Kashpur, then I considered it necessary to investigate it more thoroughly; which is why I went there on the 8th of May deliberately across the steppe, with the intention of having an opportunity to collect rare herbs growing there, although I could have gotten there much faster by water, because straight across the Volga it is considered to be no more than eight miles from here to Kashpur ...

Suburb of Kashpur (Fig. 38),
or, as the residents pronounce it - Kashker, stands on Mount Kuchugur near the Volga branch, at the very mouth of the Kashpurka River, after which the suburb is named. This is an ancient Russian place in this country, and, as is known, it was built even before Syzran. On the high part of the mountain at the midday end of Kashpur, you can see four more collapsed towers of what used to be a wooden fortress, from which, to protect the houses, a considerable distance is surrounded by a palisade, even to the Kashpurki river, where there is a watchtower, and another similar one stands on the western part of the mountain...

To explore the local slate coal, I examined the shore, going down by boat about five miles, even to the Epiphany Monastery located on the Volga. A layer of slate coal lay above the arrived water, and both in color and composition, and in flame and smell during combustion, it was completely similar to the noted slate found in the upper layers near Simbirsk; but during drying it splits even more, and then it looks like pine bark. This slate coal can be used in a forge as needed, and although only a few feet deep under the slate there is blue clay, there should be no doubt that there is no better coal even deeper.”

This was one of the very first descriptions of the Kashpir oil shale deposit, the industrial development of which began only in the twentieth century. In total, Pallas's expedition explored the surroundings of Syzran for a week. His detachment was about to set off on the return journey to Samara on May 11, but it was on this day that a storm of unprecedented force broke out, which “tore off the roofs of almost all the houses in Kostychi.” The expedition failed to leave Syzran on the morning of May 12, and “the reason for this was the misfortune that befell my servant, because a shot from a gun loaded on geese crushed his leg (thigh - V.E.). Philanthropy demanded that this mortally wounded man be given help and taken to a convenient place; So on the 12th they took him to the nearby city of Stavropol, because a short water route along the Usa River flowing a mile away was quite possible there. But again it was not possible to set off on a long journey before noon, which is why I arrived in Usolye that day in the evening.”

Pallas left us the following note about this settlement: “The spacious settlement of Usolye (Fig. 39)
built on a ridge along which a small, brackish-water river, the Usolka, flows from the southwestern side into the Volga, and even higher than this settlement receives another river, flowing from the west, with fresh water, the Elshanka. High water, which understands a vast low place, also enters Usolka, for which reason, instead of a bridge, a dam was made of fascinite for crossing. On the other side of the river begins a high forested mountain range, which stretches along the Volga in the manner described above, and only eight miles from here it is interrupted at the mouth of the Usa River flowing into the Volga.”

Sulfur town

From Usolye the expedition left in a northerly direction, making a circle through the villages of Berezovka, Kuzkino, Mazu, Teydakovo and Novodevichye for their inspection and brief description. After returning back to Usolye, the path of Pallas’s group again passed through Perevoloki and Staraya Ryazan, and then the leader decided to deviate south from the previously traveled route. As Pallas wrote, “turning closer to the Volga, we went to the village of Brusyane. The road lies there through the forest in which the Tatar maple was now blooming... Closer to the Volga there begin high, partly overgrown with bushes, and partly bare hills and difficult narrow roads, on which the minks of poisonous spiders were visible, and the Ruyschiana grass was blooming. On the hills there are many marmot holes, in which the marmots themselves sat and whistled with their piercing whistles, as if in mockery of those passing by.”

In Brusyany the detachment stayed a little longer than expected, which is why “at night we arrived in the village of Sevryukova, inhabited by unbaptized Chuvash, which, according to Tatar and Chuvash custom, was named after its first villager. The next day the peasants made preparations for the extraordinary offering of a large sacrifice to ask for rain, but it was postponed for our arrival, and although we were overly eager to be at this celebration, we did not want to force them to do so, and thereby become persecutors of their law.” . It was not in vain that Pallas made a note about this in his book, because all pagan customs and rituals in Russia at that time were prohibited by law and cruelly punished by the Orthodox Church. Therefore, the scientist was afraid that his involuntary testimony would cause harm to the local unbaptized residents.

Further, the expedition’s path ran through the villages of Karmaly and Vinnovka, from which the road led it to the village of Shelekhmet, already familiar to the researchers, and from here to Rozhdestveno, where the detachment arrived on May 23. Having sent some of the expedition members to rest in Samara, Pallas and his remaining colleagues decided to visit the Serny town, located in the Zhiguli Mountains, above the village of Podgory, which had been moved here from Sergievsk. Here the workers mined not self-grown sulfur for the needs of the Russian defense industry, but crystalline sulfur, layers of which had long before been discovered in these places.

Mines for ore extraction were built on one of the peaks of the eastern Zhiguli, which from that time was called Sulfur Mountain (Fig. 40).
Pallas left the following information about it: “The glorious mountain, from which native combustible sulfur was taken, rises very steeply from the bank of Voloshka almost opposite the mouth of the Soka River, and it seems that it will be about a hundred fathoms high. From the highest limestone mountain, which, moving away from the Volga, surrounds Sulfur Mountain on the western side, this is separated by a wooded and populated valley called Koptev or Coal Gully.”

The Sulfur town itself, according to the leader of the expedition, on the day of its visit had all the signs of abandonment, since by that time most of the deposit had already been developed: “The Sulfur town, which was transferred here from Sergievsky district for sulfur work at the beginning of this century, consists of a wooden office building, two factory courtyards and about 40 peasant houses near the mountain on the high bank of houses built on the street, in which working people formerly lived. But as work in the factories stopped, most of them dispersed, and now there are no more than 12 huts in which the factory’s serfs live, and the rest of the houses have all collapsed. Until 1720, the sulfur plant was part of the voivodeship office located in Samara; but in the same year, the office of artillery and fortification entrusted the supervision of it to Major Ivan Molostov, who continued the work until 1757; but when this plant was given to the St. Petersburg merchant Ivan Martov, his son Afanasy did not produce work for almost five years, and therefore the plant was empty. At the first establishment of Onago there were 22 craftsmen and 576 people, most of them taken from Sergievsk, workers who were paid for their work. The workers changed every month, so there were always about 130 people at work. But under the new establishment, 120 hired people and a small number of serfs constantly worked. The usual amount of pure combustible sulfur supplied from the plant was 1,500 poods annually; but it would be easy to make up to two thousand poods, from which the superiority of the local sulfur work and management compared to the factories in Yaroslavl, Kadoma and Elatma is quite clear, in which places barely up to 500 poods are made from pyrites of pure combustible sulfur annually. Here, a pound of pure combustible sulfur cost from 50 to 80 kopecks on site, and for transportation in the winter to Moscow they paid 12 kopecks per pound.

In fact, it is worthy of regret that the extensive sulfur work here is obviously coming to an end, and one should wish that another breeder would restore it for the benefit of the state, because there is enough forest in this country, and better management could not only make the work easier, but and make it more profitable.”

After visiting the Sulfur town, Pallas again went to the left bank of the Volga, about which he wrote: “I returned to Samara on the 30th of May. At this time, it was possible to see from the traces left from the high water on the low islands overgrown with meadow grass that the water in the Volga had already dropped by two arshins, and in the first days of June it decreased even more, so that on the 14th the Samara River was already in its banks. Residents in these countries will not remember that in any year there was such a small flood; from which we must conclude that last winter there was not much snow, and in the spring the weather was dry; for usually the Volga falls in the last days of June; and this year the spilled water did not reach its usual height.”

More than two weeks after this, the researcher continued to examine and describe the flora and fauna of the Samara environs (Fig. 41-45),




and also waited for the return of the group that was specially sent to them to study the relief, as well as the flora and fauna of the western part of the Zhiguli Mountains. The scientist spoke about this in the following lines of his book: “From Sulfur Town I sent some of the students who were with me to examine the high mountains in this country at the mouth of the Usa River and collect the plants found on them. They returned on June 23rd, and announced the following sights. On a smaller mountain located at the very mouth of the Usa, which the local residents call the [Usinsk] mound by its appearance (Fig. 46),
there is a lot of bell flax (Linum campanulatum) and bush plantain (Polygonum frutescens), which I did not expect to be here; but it grows in the greatest perfection, as befits its name... The village of Zhigulikha (now the village of Zhiguli, Stavropol region - V.E.), after which all the mountains extending to Markvash are named, consists of a small number of courtyards, and is located on the banks of the Volga between the above-mentioned mound, and another from the river rising up a stone and high mountain, Molodetskaya mound (Fig. 47)
called... Molodetskaya Kurgan is partly named because young people from the village gather there on holidays for fun, and partly because there are many graves of people who sailed on ships along the Volga and people who died there, either at their request or as usual shipowners are buried here. On the river side the mountain is rocky, and shows a high stone wall made of gray limestone; and, by the way, a round stone mound is visible, which the peasants call Lepeshka. In this stone side there are pits or caves between calcareous layers, the bottom of which is covered with whitish spar crystals, having the appearance of quartz, and the shape of six-sided irregular pyramids.”

Along the steppes of the Volga region

But when the named students returned to Samara on June 23, they no longer found the main detachment of the expedition led by its leadership here, since Pallas, according to his diary entries, on June 16 set off along the Samara River towards Orenburg. However, the student group caught up with the expedition in the area of ​​​​Alekseevsk (now the village of Alekseevka, Kinelsky district), which Pallas described in his book as follows: “The suburb of Alekseevsk stands on a mountain near Samara, into which the Kinel River flowed from the right side a little higher than this place. At the very junction of the rivers, the Zakamskaya line begins, the traces of which are already deliberately overgrown. Alekseevsk is partly inhabited by Samara Cossacks, partly by detached soldiers, and partly by craftsmen and arable people, and is likened to a large village. In the mountain on which this suburb is built, they break soft white limestone, from which the residents make various small things. But most of the hill lies on a gypsum flask, which is visible on the shore of Samara, and has split into horizontal slabs. This gypsum flask consists of gray, yellowish, white and selenite layers. The white stone is much larger, but on the contrary, the gray one has very thin layers. The pits sometimes contain green marl. At the top of the mountain, and moreover, in the very suburbs, there is a deliberately deep cauldron-like pit, which never dries up, and is called Lake Ladanskoye, because a strong oil smell can be heard on its banks. The water in it is cloudy, silty, and smells of mud, but the cattle drink it willingly, there is no fish in it at all. On the contrary, in the lakes located in low places there is a lot of not only fish (Fig. 48-50),


but also muskrats and turtles (Fig. 51).
In the Samara River there are many Volga sterlets and carp; Catfish and white fish often come here. There are also plenty of lampreys and loaches. The glander fish here is deliberately large and is called lobach (Ballerus).”

Setting off from Alekseevsk further towards Buzuluk and Orenburg, the expedition moved along the Samara fortified line (Fig. 52),
which by that time had already lost its defensive significance. Pallas left us general notes about the region he saw: “From Alekseevsk there is a direct road across the steppe to the Yaitsky Cossack town, along which there are no decent inns or smelters, but only huts with huts where you can get hay and water. The ordinary Orenburg summer road goes from Alekseevsk along the steppe or left side of Samara, and in winter between Samara and Kinel along meadows and hills to the one inhabited by Kazan Tatars (Fig. 53),
Cossack post correcting, Mochinskaya Sloboda (28 versts), then to the Krasnosamarskaya fortress (17 versts), and from here, through two roads built for the distance of the Kechets, to the Bogataya and Borskaya fortresses (49 versts) ... One cannot imagine the most pleasant country: for in many In some places there are pine, aspen, and birch forests; there are also hills and hay meadows abundant in grass. This country stretching along Samara should be the most populated, because there is quite a fair amount of arable land for many villages, there is also no shortage of forests, and many very large hay meadows. In this country there are also wild goats, called saiga (roe deer - V.E., Fig. 54);
and moose wandering so far in winter that Samara and the rivers flowing into it are overgrown with bushes, and even right up to the mountainous steppe. Moose (Fig. 55)
in winter, they mostly feed on young branches and bark of aspen and poplar, and there is enough such food for them in this country; and in the summer they have shelter and food in the vast, uninhabited mountainous steppe.”

On his further path, Pallas turned from Samara to the Kinel River (now Bolshoi Kinel), described the Krivolutskaya Sloboda standing on it, the Sarbai River, the village of Timashevo, and on June 20 he reached Cherkasskaya Sloboda (now the regional center of Kinel-Cherkassy), about which there is such a record in his book: “This pleasant country dotted with copses and meadows continues to the Cherkasy settlement, built on an open field on the banks of the Kinelya River. Little Russian villagers who had previously established homes in different places on the Yaitskaya Line, but due to Kyrgyz raids (Fig. 56)
could not live there, they built the aforementioned settlement in 1744, which is now in a flourishing state. They live according to their ancient custom, have clean courtyards, white huts with good stoves and chimneys, for the most part take care of tabash gardens and cattle breeding, and lead a cheerful and relaxed life. They choose among themselves an ataman, who has a captain under him, and this choice is approved by the Stavropol chancellery. The dress they wear is Cossack, similar to Polish. Women in the summer wear nothing more than just a shirt with an embroidered collar (Fig. 57), and instead of a skirt, they wrap around themselves a variegated karasea, which they weave themselves, and tie it with a wide belt. This garment is called by them a plakhta, and both in color and in stripes, it bears a resemblance to the zapan of the Highland Scots, which they call a pland. Cherkassy wives wear small caps made of colorful material on their heads, and tie a bandage on top of them, with embroidered blades hanging at the back of the knot. The girls braid their hair not like Russians, in one, but in two braids, wrapped around the head, and tied with a colorful bandage, which is lined with beads. Cherkassy matchmaking in the present case (which is also used by the Highland Scots with a slight modification) is in all respects similar to the Tatar custom.”

Then the detachment headed south, towards the former Bor fortress, which Pallas also mentioned in his book: “From Cherkassk I went beyond Kinel along the wide, mostly empty and deliberately dry steppe between this river and Samara to the Bor fortress, and , therefore, again to the Samara River. Apart from the swamp located not far from Kinel, there is no water until the village of Strakhovaya, or Kutuluk, where a swampy river of the same name flows and flows into Kinel, where a deep well is dug. In this steppe it would be possible to have such wells everywhere, so farmers could settle there. The country here is somewhat hilly and rich in marmots. In all the steppes near Kinel and Samara there are bears, which have their dens in valleys overgrown with bushes. In this empty country there were many herons everywhere (Fig. 58),
cranes and wild gray geese with cubs... The Bor fortress is inhabited by Cossacks and retired soldiers, and stands near the right bank of Samara on a flat sandy ridge, in the corner that came from the Samara River and from a wide sandy gulley. Apparently, the river previously had a different course there, for there are many stagnant swamps filled with turtles. From the aforementioned gully, called an oxbow, to the Samara River, this place was fortified with a log wall, but now only slingshots have been installed instead... Borsk stands on the Samara line, and in order is considered the second and last fortress on the right bank of the Samara River. From here the road extends to the other flat steppe side; but on the contrary, the right bank rises with almost continuous ridges, representing the same country that exists under Kinel, which is why they have already begun to establish master villages in almost all the rivers flowing in Samara.”

From Borsky, Pallas’s detachment proceeded through the outskirts of the Buzuluksky forest (Fig. 59)
to the Olshansky fortress (now the village of Elshanka), which in his book is given a brief description and a note that the places south of it are inhabited by Bashkirs (Fig. 60).
After this, again along the banks of the Samara River, the expedition traveled to the Buzulutsk fortress (now the city of Buzuluk), which was under the administrative subordination of Samara for almost two centuries, but is now located in the Orenburg region. This concludes the description of the journey of the expedition group of Peter Pallas through the territory of the Samara region.

At the same time, his multi-volume work “Journey through different provinces of the Russian Empire” went through several editions in our country alone (Fig. 61).
Subsequently, Pallas's book was translated into many languages ​​(Fig. 62),
and for decades it remained for the scientific world a source of fundamental knowledge about the nature and population of a large part of the Russian Empire. And it should be noted that Pallas’s work retains its enormous historical and educational significance right up to the present day.

If we evaluate the results of the First and Second Orenburg physical expeditions as a whole, then in the 18th century they provided a solid basis for a grandiose geodetic event - the General Survey, which was carried out almost throughout the entire territory of the Russian state for about 100 years. Starting from the Moscow province, in 1765, detailed boundary maps of a significant part of the counties of European Russia began to be gradually compiled. Land surveying was basically completed in 1885 in the Arkhangelsk province. By that time, 36 provinces were completely demarcated, including the Middle Volga region.

As for Peter Pallas, after more than 40 years of research work in Russia, he returned to his homeland in Berlin, where he lived for only one year after his arrival, and died on September 8, 1811, just two weeks before his seventieth birthday (Fig. 63, 64).

Valery EROFEEV.

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P. S. Pallas (1741 - 1811) - naturalist and traveler-encyclopedist, who glorified his name with major contributions to geography, zoology, botany, paleontology, mineralogy, geology, ethnography, history and linguistics. Pallas explored the vast spaces of the Volga region, the Caspian region, Bashkiria, the Urals, Siberia, Ciscaucasia and Crimea. In many respects, this was a real discovery of the vast territories of Russia for science.

Pallas's geographical merits are enormous, not only in terms of inventorying a colossal amount of facts, but also in his ability to systematize and explain them. Pallas was a pioneer in deciphering the orohydrography of large parts of the Urals, Altai, Sayan and Crimea, and in judging their geological structure, and in the scientific description of mineral wealth, as well as the flora and fauna of Russia. He collected a lot of information about its mining industry, agriculture and forestry, ethnography, languages ​​and history.

N.A. Severtsov emphasized that Pallas, studying “the connections of all three kingdoms of nature,” established “strong views” on the importance of meteorological, soil and climatic influences... There is no branch of the natural sciences in which Pallas would not pave a new path, would not leave a brilliant model for the researchers who followed him... He set an example of unprecedented accuracy in the scientific processing of the materials he collected. In his versatility, Pallas is reminiscent of the encyclopedic scientists of antiquity and the Middle Ages; in terms of accuracy and positivity, this is a modern scientist, not an 18th century one.”

The theory about the origin of mountains expressed by Pallas in 1777 marked a whole stage in the development of Earth science. Like Saussure, who outlined the first patterns in the structure of the subsoil of the Alps, Pallas, who was called the Russian Saussure, was able to grasp the first signs of a regular (zonal) structure in such complex mountain systems as the Urals and the mountains of southern Siberia, and made general theoretical conclusions from these observations. It is important that, not yet being able to overcome the worldview of the catastrophists, Pallas sought to reflect and decipher all the complexity and diversity of the causes of geological processes. He wrote: “To find reasonable causes of changes on our Earth, it is necessary to combine many new hypotheses, and not take just one, as other authors of the Earth theory do.” Pallas spoke about “floods” and volcanic eruptions, and about “catastrophic failures of the bottom”, as one of the reasons for the decrease in sea level, and concluded: “Obviously, nature uses very diverse methods for the formation and movement of mountains and for the creation of other phenomena that have changed the surface of the Earth." Pallas's ideas had, as Cuvier admitted, a great influence on the development of general geological concepts even of such recognized founders of geology as Werner and Saussure.

However, in attributing to Pallas the foundation of “the beginning of all modern geology,” Cuvier committed an obvious exaggeration and demonstrated his unfamiliarity with Lomonosov’s ideas. A. V. Khabakov emphasizes that Pallas’s reasoning about worldwide upheavals and catastrophes was “an outwardly spectacular, but poorly thought-out and false concept, a step back, in comparison, for example, with Lomonosov’s views “about changes insensitive to the passage of time” of the boundaries of land and sea.” . By the way, in his later writings Pallas does not rely on his catastrophist hypothesis and, describing the nature of the Crimea in 1794, speaks of mountain uplifts as “phenomena that cannot be explained.”

According to V.V. Belousov, “the name of Pallas stands first in the history of our regional geological research... For almost a century, Pallas’s books lay on the tables of geologists as reference books, and, leafing through these thick volumes, one could always find something new in them, a previously unnoticed indication of the presence here or there of a valuable mineral, and such dry and brief messages later more than once became the cause of major geological discoveries... Geologists joke that the historical outline of research in any geological report should begin with the words: “More Pallas...”

Pallas, as if foreseeing this, kept detailed notes, not neglecting any little things, and explained it this way: “Many things that may now seem insignificant, in time, may become of great importance to our descendants.” Pallas's comparison of the Earth's layers with a book of ancient chronicles, from which one can read its history, has now become a part of any textbook on geology and physical geography. Pallas far-sightedly predicted that these archives of nature, “preceding the alphabet and the most distant legends, we have only just begun to read, but the material contained in them will not be exhausted for several centuries after us.” The attention that Pallas paid to the study of connections between phenomena led him to many important physical and geographical conclusions. N.A. Severtsov wrote about this: “...Climatology and physical geography did not exist before Pallas. He dealt with them more than all his contemporaries and was in this respect a worthy predecessor of Humboldt... Pallas was the first to observe periodic phenomena in the life of animals. In 1769, he drew up a plan for these observations for the members of the expedition...” According to this plan, it was necessary to record the course of temperature, the opening of rivers, the timing of the arrival of birds, the flowering of plants, the awakening of animals from hibernation, etc. This also depicts Pallas as one of the first organizers of phenological studies in Russia observations.

Pallas described hundreds of species of animals, expressed many interesting thoughts about their connections with the environment and outlined their habitats, which allows us to speak of him as one of the founders of zoogeography. Pallas's fundamental contribution to paleontology was his studies of the fossil remains of the mammoth, buffalo and hairy rhinoceros, first from museum collections and then from his own collections. Pallas tried to explain the finding of elephant bones mixed “with sea shells and bones of sea fish,” as well as the discovery of the corpse of a hairy rhinoceros with surviving hair in the permafrost on the Vilyue River. The scientist could not yet admit that rhinoceroses and elephants lived so far in the north, and invoked a sudden catastrophic invasion of the ocean to explain their introduction from the south. And yet, the very attempt at paleogeographical interpretation of the finds of fossil remains was valuable.

In 1793, Pallas described leaf imprints from the tertiary deposits of Kamchatka - this was the first information about fossil plants from the territory of Russia. Pallas's fame as a botanist is associated with the major "Flora of Russia" he began.

Pallas proved that the level of the Caspian Sea lies below the level of the World Ocean, but that before the Caspian Sea reached General Syrt and Ergeni. Having established the relationship of fish and shellfish of the Caspian and the Black Sea, Pallas created a hypothesis about the existence in the past of a single Ponto-Aral-Caspian basin and its separation when waters broke through the Bosphorus Strait.

In his early works, Pallas acted as a forerunner of evolutionists, defending the variability of organisms, and even drew a family tree of animal development, but later moved to a metaphysical position of denying the variability of species. In understanding nature as a whole, an evolutionary and spontaneously materialistic worldview was characteristic of Pallas until the end of his life.

Contemporaries were amazed by Pallas' ability to work. He published 170 papers, including dozens of major studies. His mind seemed designed to collect and organize the chaos of countless facts and to reduce them into clear systems of classifications. Pallas combined acute observation, phenomenal memory, great discipline of thought, which ensured timely recording of everything observed, and the highest scientific honesty. One can vouch for the reliability of the facts recorded by Pallas, the measurement data he provides, descriptions of forms, etc. “How zealously I observe justice in my science (and perhaps, to my misfortune, too much), so in all this description of my journey I did not step out of it,” and in the least: for according to my concept, to take a thing for another and respect it more than what it is It really is, where to add, and where to hide, I defended for punishment a worthy offense against a scientist in the world, especially among naturalists...”

Descriptions made by scientists of many localities, tracts, settlements, features of the economy and way of life will never lose value precisely because of their detail and reliability: these are standards for measuring the changes that have occurred in nature and people over subsequent eras.

Pallas was born on September 22, 1741 in Berlin in the family of a German professor-surgeon. The boy's mother was French. Studying with home teachers until the age of 13, Pallas became proficient in languages ​​(Latin and modern European), which later greatly facilitated his scientific work, especially when compiling dictionaries and developing scientific terminology.

In 1761 - 1762 Pallas studied the collections of naturalists in England, and also toured its shores, collecting sea animals.

The 22-year-old young man was such a recognized authority that he was already elected as a member of the Academy of London and Rome. In 1766, Pallas published the zoological work “Study of Zoophytes,” which marked a revolution in taxonomy: corals and sponges, which had just been transferred by zoologists from the plant world to the animal world, were classified in detail by Pallas. At the same time, he began to develop a family tree of animals, thus acting as a forerunner of evolutionists.

Returning to Berlin in 1767, Pallas published a number of monographs and collections on zoology. But it was at this time that a sharp turn awaited him, as a result of which the scientist ended up in Russia for 42 years, in a country that literally became his second homeland.

Kruger, Franz – Portrait of Peter Simon Pallas

In 1767, Pallas was recommended to Catherine II as a brilliant scientist capable of carrying out the comprehensive studies of its nature and economy planned in Russia. The 26-year-old scientist came to St. Petersburg both as a professor of “natural history” and then as an ordinary academician with a salary of 800 rubles. a year began to study a new country for him. Among his official duties, he was assigned to “invent something new in his science,” teach students and “multiply with worthy things” the academic “natural cabinet.”

Pallas was entrusted with leading the first detachment of the so-called Orenburg physical expeditions. Young geographers who later grew into major scientists took part in the expedition. Among them were Lepekhin, Zuev, Rychkov, Georgi and others. Some of them (for example, Lepekhin) made independent routes under the leadership of Pallas; others (Georgi) accompanied him at certain stages of the journey. But there were companions who went with Pallas the whole way (students Zuev and chemist Nikita Sokolov, scarecrow Shuisky, draftsman Dmitriev, etc.). Russian satellites provided enormous assistance to Pallas, who was just beginning to study the Russian language, participating in the collection of collections, making additional excursions to the side, conducting questioning work, organizing transportation and household arrangements. The inseparable companion who carried this difficult expedition was Pallas’s young wife (he married in 1767).

The instructions given to Pallas by the Academy might seem overwhelming for a modern large complex expedition. Pallas was instructed to “investigate the properties of waters, soils, methods of cultivating the land, the state of agriculture, common diseases of people and animals and find means for their treatment and prevention, research beekeeping, sericulture, cattle breeding, especially sheep breeding.” Further, among the objects of study, mineral wealth and waters, arts, crafts, trades, plants, animals, “the shape and interior of mountains”, geographical, meteorological and astronomical observations and definitions, morals, customs, legends, monuments and “various antiquities” were listed. . And yet this enormous amount of work was indeed largely accomplished by Pallas during six years of travel.

The expedition, in which the scientist considered his participation a great happiness, began in June 1768 and lasted six years. All this time, Pallas worked tirelessly, keeping detailed diaries, collecting abundant collections on geology, biology and ethnography. This required continuous effort, constant haste, and grueling long-distance travel off-road. Constant deprivation, colds, and frequent malnutrition undermined the scientist’s health.

Pallas spent the winter periods editing diaries, which he immediately sent to St. Petersburg for printing, which ensured that his reports began to be published (from 1771) even before returning from the expedition.

In 1768 he reached Simbirsk, in 1769 he visited Zhiguli, the Southern Urals (Orsk region), the Caspian lowland and lake. Inder reached Guryev, after which he returned to Ufa. Pallas spent 1770 in the Urals, studying its numerous mines, and visited Bogoslovsk [Karpinsk], Mount Grace, Nizhny Tagil, Yekaterinburg [Sverdlovsk], Troitsk, Tyumen, Tobolsk and wintered in Chelyabinsk. Having completed the given program, Pallas himself turned to the Academy for permission to extend the expedition to the regions of Siberia. Having received this permission, Pallas in 1771 traveled through Kurgan, Ishim and Tara to Omsk and Semipalatinsk. Based on questioning data, Pallas highlighted the issue of fluctuations in the level of lakes in the Trans-Urals and Western Siberia and associated changes in the productivity of meadows, in fisheries and salt industries. Pallas examined the Kolyvan silver “mines” in Rudny Altai, visited Tomsk, Barnaul, the Minusinsk Basin and spent the winter in Krasnoyarsk.

In 1772, he passed Irkutsk and Baikal (he entrusted the study of Lake Pallas to Georgi, who joined him), traveled to Transbaikalia, and reached Chita and Kyakhta. At this time, Nikita Sokolov traveled on his instructions to the Argun prison. On the way back, Pallas continued Georgi's work on the inventory of Lake Baikal, as a result of which almost the entire lake was described. Returning to Krasnoyarsk, in the same 1772, Pallas made a trip to the Western Sayan Mountains and the Minusinsk Basin.

The return from the expedition took a year and a half. On the way back through Tomsk, Tara, Yalutorovsk, Chelyabinsk, Sarapul (with a stop in Kazan), Yaitsky Gorodok [Uralsk], Astrakhan, Tsaritsyn, lake. Elton and Saratov, having spent the winter in Tsaritsyn, the scientist made excursions down the Volga to Akhtuba, to Mount B. Bogdo and to the salt lake Baskunchak. Having passed Tambov and Moscow, in July 1774, thirty-three-year-old Pallas ended his unprecedented journey, returning to St. Petersburg as a gray-haired and sick man. Stomach diseases and inflammation of the eyes haunted him throughout his life.

However, he considered even the loss of health to be rewarded by the impressions received and said:

“...The very bliss of seeing nature in its very being in a noble part of the world, where a person has deviated very little from it, and learning from it, served me as a hefty reward for the lost youth and health, which no envy can take away from me.”

Pallas's five-volume work "Travel through Various Provinces", first published in German in 1771 - 1776, represented the first comprehensive and thorough description of a huge country, almost unknown at that time scientifically. It is no wonder that this work was quickly translated not only into Russian (1773 - 1788), but also into English and French with notes by prominent scientists, for example Lamarck.

Pallas did a great job of editing and publishing the works of a number of researchers. In 1776 - 1781 he published “Historical News of the Mongolian People”, reporting in them, along with historical information, a lot of ethnographic information about the Kalmyks, Buryats and, according to questioning data, about Tibet. In his materials about the Kalmyks, Pallas included, in addition to his observations, data from the geographer Gmelin, who died in the Caucasus.

Upon returning from the expedition, Pallas was surrounded with honor, made a historiographer of the Admiralty and a teacher of his august grandchildren - the future Emperor Alexander I and his brother Constantine.

The “Cabinet of Natural Monuments” collected by Pallas was acquired for the Hermitage in 1786.

Twice (in 1776 and 1779) in response to requests from the Academy of Sciences, Pallas came up with bold projects for new expeditions to the north and east of Siberia (he was attracted by the Yenisei and Lena, Kolyma and Kamchatka, the Kuril and Aleutian Islands). Pallas promoted the myriad natural resources of Siberia and argued against the prejudice that “the northern climate is not favorable for the formation of precious stones.” However, none of these expeditions came to fruition.

Pallas's life in the capital was connected with his participation in resolving a number of government issues and with receiving many foreign guests. Catherine II invited Pallas to compile a dictionary of “all languages ​​and dialects.”

On June 23, 1777, the scientist gave a speech at the Academy of Sciences and spoke warmly about the plains of Russia as the fatherland of a powerful people, as a “nursery of heroes” and “the best refuge of sciences and arts,” about “the arena of the wonderful activity of the enormous creative spirit of Peter the Great.” .

Developing the already mentioned theory of mountain formation, he noticed the confinement of granites and the ancient “primary” shales surrounding them, devoid of fossils, to the axial zones of the mountains. Pallas found that towards the periphery (“on the sides of the masses of previous mountains”) they are covered with rocks of “secondary” formation - limestones and clays, and also that these rocks from bottom to top along the section lie more and more shallowly and contain more and more fossils. Pallas also noted that steep ravines and caves with stalactites are confined to limestone.

Finally, on the periphery of mountainous countries, he noted the presence of sedimentary rocks of “Tertiary” formation (later in the Cis-Ural region their age turned out to be Permian).

Pallas explained this structure by a certain sequence of ancient volcanic processes and sedimentation and made the bold conclusion that the entire territory of Russia was once the seabed, and only islands of “primary granites” rose above the sea. Although Pallas himself believed that volcanism was the reason for the tilting of strata and the raising of mountains, he reproached the one-sidedness of the Italian naturalists, who, “seeing fire-breathing volcanoes constantly before their eyes, attributed everything to internal fire.” Noting that often “the highest mountains are composed of granite,” Pallas made the astonishingly profound conclusion that granite “forms the foundation of the continents” and that “it contains no fossils, therefore it predates organic life.”

In 1777, on behalf of the Academy of Sciences, Pallas completed and in 1781 published an important historical and geographical study “On Russian discoveries on the seas between Asia and America.” In the same 1777, Pallas published a large monograph on rodents, then a number of works on various mammals and insects. Pallas described animals not only as a taxonomist, but also illuminated their connections with the environment, thus acting as one of the founders of ecology.

In his Memoir of the Varieties of Animals (1780), Pallas moved to an anti-evolutionary point of view on the question of the variability of species, declaring their diversity and relatedness to be the influence of a “creative force.” But in the same “Memoir” the scientist anticipates a number of modern views on artificial hybridization, speaking “about the inconstancy of some breeds of domestic animals.”

Since 1781, Pallas, having received the herbariums of his predecessors at his disposal, worked on the “Flora of Russia”. The first two volumes of “Flora” (1784 - 1788) were officially distributed to the provinces of Russia. Also distributed throughout the country was the “Resolution on Afforestation”, written by Pallas on behalf of the government, consisting of 66 points. During 1781 - 1806 Pallas created a monumental summary of insects (mainly beetles). In 1781, Pallas founded the magazine “New Northern Notes”, publishing in it a lot of materials about the nature of Russia and voyages to Russian America.

With all the honor of the position, metropolitan life could not help but weigh heavily on the born researcher and traveler. He obtained permission to go on a new expedition at his own expense, this time in the south of Russia. On February 1, 1793, Pallas and his family left St. Petersburg through Moscow and Saratov to Astrakhan. An unfortunate incident - a fall into icy water while crossing the Klyazma - led to a further deterioration in his health. In the Caspian region, Pallas visited a number of lakes and hills, then climbed up the Kuma to Stavropol, examined the sources of the Mineralovodsk group and traveled through Novocherkassk to Simferopol.

In the early spring of 1794, the scientist began studying Crimea. In the fall, Pallas returned to St. Petersburg via Kherson, Poltava and Moscow and presented Catherine II with a description of Crimea, along with a request to allow him to move there to live. Along with permission, Pallas received from the empress a house in Simferopol, two villages with plots of land in the Aytodor and Sudak valleys, and 10 thousand rubles for the establishment of gardening and winemaking schools in Crimea. At the same time, his academic salary was retained.

Pallas enthusiastically devoted himself to exploring the nature of Crimea and promoting its agricultural development. He went to the most inaccessible places of the Crimean mountains, planted orchards and vineyards in the Sudak and Koz valleys, and wrote a number of articles on agricultural technology of southern crops in the conditions of the Crimea.

Pallas's house in Simferopol was a place of pilgrimage for all honored guests of the city, although Pallas lived modestly and was burdened by the external splendor of his fame. Eyewitnesses describe him as already close to old age, but still fresh and vigorous. Memories of his travels brought him, in his words, more pleasure than his glory itself.

Pallas continued to process the observations he had made earlier in the Crimea. In 1799 - 1801 he published a description of his second journey, which included, in particular, a thorough description of the Crimea. Pallas's works about the Crimea are the pinnacle of his achievements as a geographer-naturalist. And pages with characteristics of the geological structure of Crimea, as A. V. Khabakov writes (p. 187), “would do honor to the field notes of a geologist even in our time.”

Pallas's considerations regarding the border between Europe and Asia are interesting. Trying to find a more suitable natural boundary for this essentially conventional cultural-historical border, Pallas disputed the drawing of this border along the Don and proposed moving it to General Syrt and Ergeni.

Pallas considered the main goal of his life to be the creation of “Russian-Asian Zoography”. He worked hardest on it in the Crimea, and with the publication of this particular book he was most unlucky: its publication was completed only in 1841, that is, 30 years after his death.

In the preface to this work, Pallas wrote, not without bitterness: “Zoography, which had been in papers for so long, collected over the course of 30 years, is finally being published. It contains one-eighth of the animals of the entire inhabited world.”

In contrast to the “thin” systematic summaries of faunas containing “dry skeletons of names and synonyms,” Pallas aimed to create a faunal summary “complete, rich and so compiled that it could be suitable for covering the whole of zoology.” In the same preface, Pallas emphasized that zoology remained his main passion throughout his life: “... And although the love of plants and works of underground nature, as well as the position and customs of peoples and agriculture constantly entertained me, from a young age I was especially interested in zoology preferably before the rest of the physiography.” In fact, “Zoography” contains such abundant materials on the ecology, distribution and economic significance of animals that it could be called “Zoogeography”.

Shortly before his death, Pallas’ life took another, unexpected turn for many. Dissatisfied with the increasing frequency of land disputes with neighbors, complaining of malaria, and also trying to see his older brother and hoping to speed up the publication of his Zoography, Pallas sold his Crimean estates for next to nothing and “with the highest permission” moved to Berlin, where he had not been for more than 42 years. The official reason for leaving was: “To put our affairs in order...” Naturalists in Germany greeted the seventy-year-old man with honor as the recognized patriarch of natural science. Pallas plunged into scientific news and dreamed of a trip to the natural history museums of France and Italy. But her poor health made itself felt. Realizing the approach of death, Pallas did a lot of work to put the manuscripts in order and distribute the remaining collections to friends. On September 8, 1811 he died.

Pallas's merits already during his lifetime received worldwide recognition. He was elected, in addition to those already mentioned, a member of the scientific societies: Berlin, Vienna, Bohemian, Montpelier, Patriotic Swedish, Hesse-Hamburg, Utrecht, Lund, St. Petersburg Free Economic, as well as the Paris National Institute and the academies of Stockholm, Naples, Göttingen and Copenhagen. In Russia he held the rank of full state councilor.

Many plants and animals were named in honor of Pallas, including the plant genus Pallasia (the name was given by Linnaeus himself, who deeply appreciated the merits of Pallas), the Crimean pine Pinus Pallasiana, etc.

Crimean pine Pinus Pallasiana

Pallas' saffron – Crocus pallasii

A special type of iron-stone meteorites is called pallasites after the “Pallas Iron” meteorite, which the scientist brought to St. Petersburg from Siberia in 1772.

Monument to Peter Simon Pallas

Off the coast of New Guinea there is Pallas Reef. In 1947, an active volcano on the island of Ketoi in the Kuril ridge was named in honor of Pallas. In Berlin, one of the streets bears the name of Pallas. Moreover, the station village of Pallasovka (a city since 1967), founded in 1907, received its interesting name also thanks to the merits of the German traveler and naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, who conducted an expedition in this region in the 18th century. It is curious that Pallas himself at one time noted that “this is a land on which it is impossible to live,” focusing on the hot climate in summer (temperatures in summer can reach +45).

Based on materials from the Internet.

help, maybe someone will find it... a report on the topic: the contribution of Academician Pallas to the study of the Taman Peninsula... can’t find it on the Internet

Answers:

In 1794, academician Peter Simon Pallas, traveling around the Taman Peninsula, discovered structures made of large flat slabs that looked like tombs. It was not far from the town of Chokrak-Koy (the area of ​​​​present-day Fontalovskaya), to which he was then heading for the night. From his own experience, the academician knew that if you don’t describe what you saw right away, then you can simply forget about it. Despite the strong wind (as they say in the books), he stopped the carriage, carried out research and made the necessary notes. Continuing his path, the scientist did not stop thinking about rectangular structures made of stone slabs placed on edge, which may have been built by the Circassians. So P.S. Pallas discovered megalithic structures - dolmens. It is believed that it was from then that the study of the dolmens of the Western Caucasus began, although not a trace remains of the Taman megaliths at present.