Introduction

Peter Simon (Peter-Simon) Pallas (German) Peter Simon Pallas; 1741-1811) - famous German and Russian encyclopedist, naturalist, geographer and traveler of the 18th-19th centuries. He became famous for his scientific expeditions across Russia in the second half of the 18th century, and made a significant contribution to world and Russian science - biology, geography, geology, philology and ethnography.

“Pallas, Peter Simon, is one of the most outstanding naturalists of all countries and times...” - this is how the article about the scientist in Polovtsov’s Russian Biographical Dictionary begins. “...a natural German, a Prussian by birth, who gave his whole life to Russia... Pallas was distinguished by the breadth of his scientific interests, attempts at scientific, deep creativity in the field of searching for generalizations in observational sciences, colossal efficiency and precise mastery of the eternal elements of the scientific method...” said V.I. Vernadsky.

1. Biography

1.1. Early years, training, first scientific works

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; mother - Susanna Lienard - came from an old Protestant family of emigrants from the French city of Metz. Pallas had an older brother and sister. This was the time of 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.

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

In Holland, in 1766, his first scientific works were published - “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 made significant changes to Linnaean classification of worms. Pallas also abandoned the “ladder of creatures” (the idea of ​​which dates back to Aristotle, but was especially widespread among naturalists in the 18th century), 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 at the insistence of his father he did not carry out these plans; in 1766 he returned to Berlin again, where he began working on “Spicilegia zoologica” (Latin) (Berlin, 1767-1804, in 2 volumes).

1.2. Russian expeditions of 1768-1774

On December 22, 1766, the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences elected Pallas as its full member and professor of natural history. At first Pallas refused, but in April 1767 he agreed - and on April 23, 1767, his election as a member of the academy was confirmed. On July 30, 1767, at the age of 26 - already having a doctorate, a professorship and recognition in Europe - Pallas arrived in Russia with his family (his young wife and young daughter) to work as an adjunct of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and the board of assessor. From the Academy he was entitled to a salary of 800 rubles a year, which was a high salary at that time.

Catherine II was actively interested in the structure and riches of her empire, and the idea of ​​a comprehensive study of the country in order to find out its geological, mineralogical, animal and plant resources, as well as to identify the historical, socio-economic and ethnographic features of its individual regions, arose from the empress after completing her own journey through Volga from Tver to Simbirsk in 1767 (Lomonosov dreamed of such an expedition). Soon, on her orders, the organization of new expeditions began - several “astronomical” and “physical” detachments. The task of six astronomical teams was to calculate the solar parallax during the passage of Venus through the disk of the Sun in July 1769 (thus making it possible to more accurately determine the distance between the Earth and the Sun). It was originally intended that Pallas would participate in an astronomical expedition to Kamchatka, but plans were later changed.

The physical expedition consisted of five small detachments - three to the Orenburg province and two to the Astrakhan province. Preparation for the expedition took a year: only in June 1768 did Pallas and his detachment leave St. Petersburg, accompanied by his family along the way. Pallas led the main detachment (1st detachment of the Orenburg expedition) from June 21, 1768 to June 30, 1774; The detachment also included captain N.P. Rychkov, high school students (two of whom later became academicians themselves) N.P. Sokolov, V.F. Zuev and Anton Walter, draftsman Nikolai Dmitriev and scarecrow Pavel Shumsky. The detachment visited the central provinces, regions of the Volga region, the Caspian lowland, the Urals, Western Siberia, Altai, Baikal and Transbaikalia. Other detachments were led by academicians Professor I.P. Falk, I.G. Georgi, I.I. Lepyokhin (to the Orenburg province), S.G. Gmelin (died during the Pugachev uprising in the Astrakhan province) and I.A. Gildenshtedt ( to the Astrakhan province).

In the general instructions for the research program, Pallas was instructed to:

“To study the properties of waters, soils, methods of cultivating the land, the state of agriculture, common diseases of people and animals and to find means for their treatment and prevention, to study beekeeping, sericulture, cattle breeding, especially sheep breeding.
Then pay attention to the mineral wealth and mineral waters, to the arts, crafts, crafts of each province, to plants, animals, to the shape and interior of the mountains and, finally, to all branches of natural history... Engage in geographical and meteorological observations, astronomically determine the position of the main areas and collect everything relating to morals, customs, beliefs, legends, monuments and various antiquities."

In general, the natural science expeditions of Catherine’s period covered a vast territory of Russia - from the Barents Sea in the north and to the Black (North Caucasus and Crimea) and Caspian (to the borders with Persia) seas in the south and from the Baltic Sea (Riga) in the west to Transbaikalia (to the borders of with China) in the east.

In the first year, the route of Pallas’s detachment passed through the cities of St. Petersburg - Novgorod the Great - Tver - Klin - Moscow - Vladimir - Kasimov - Murom - Arzamas - Penza - Simbirsk - Samara - Stavropol (now Tolyatti) - Simbirsk. The expedition spent the first winter in Simbirsk. In March 1769, Pallas and a detachment went through Stavropol (Tolyatti) to Samara, then to Syzran and Serny Gorodok (now Sernovodsk); returning to Samara, he moved through Borsk (now the village of Borskoye, Samara region) to Orenburg, then to Yaitsky town (now Uralsk), then along the Ural River he reached Guryev, and then, through the steppe, to Ufa, where he remained until 1770 . During the winter in Ufa, Pallas completed the first volume of a description of his journey - “Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Rußischen Reichs” (German) (“Travel through the various provinces of the Russian state”) - which the following year, 1771, was published in St. Petersburg.

In May 1770, Pallas left Ufa. He devoted the summer to studying the Ural Mountains, was in Yekaterinburg, visited local mining factories; was on the Tura River. I stopped in Chelyabinsk for the winter. Already in winter I traveled to Tobolsk and Tyumen, then returned to Chelyabinsk. In April 1771, Pallas and his detachment left Chelyabinsk and arrived in Omsk in May. Through Altai the expedition reached Tomsk.

Pallas and his detachment spent the winter in Krasnoyarsk. During the winter, Pallas prepared the second volume of his work “Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Rußischen Reichs”. From his letters to Johann Albrecht Euler, secretary of the Academy of Sciences, it follows that he intended to continue his journey to China, but now due to poor health he is forced to abandon this plan. Pallas also complained to Euler that the 1771 journey was a continuous series of failures and troubles. In a letter to Johann Peter Falk, Pallas wrote that he had lost all desire for further travel and felt like a Siberian exile... Fortunately, Pallas's health improved, and academician Johann Gottlieb Georgi came to Krasnoyarsk.

In March 1772, Pallas and his detachment left Krasnoyarsk. Through Irkutsk on the ice of Lake Baikal they reached Selenginsk (now Novoselenginsk), then to Kyakhta. After returning to Selenginsk, Pallas visited Dauria. Through Selenginsk and Irkutsk, Pallas returned to Krasnoyarsk, where he stayed until January 1773, after which he set off on his way back, towards the European part of Russia. Pallas proceeded through Tomsk, Tara, Sarapul and Kazan. In September he stopped in Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd), where he remained until the spring of the following year. During the winter he made several trips, including a visit to Astrakhan.

In total, the route of the Pallas detachment amounted to 27,264 versts (about 29,085 km), of which 6,000 versts (about 6,400 km) were done by V.F. Zuev and N.P. Sokolov. In terms of its scale and complexity, such an expeditionary project would still seem difficult to implement today. The long-term journey was associated with great difficulties and required enormous effort; moreover, Pallas was faced with a sharply continental climate that was unusual for him. As Pallas himself notes at the end of the description of his journey, he returned to the capital with an exhausted body and graying hair in the thirty-third year of his life. During the journey, Pallas was repeatedly ill, he froze his heels, and he had chronic inflammation of the eyes. They had to spend the night in abandoned winter huts, in dugouts, and sometimes in the open air. The roads caused a lot of trouble, and it was difficult to get good horses. In winter they rode on sleighs, and in summer they rode on carts and sailed on boats. There were also troubled areas where nomads, who had recently become part of Russia, did not shy away from robbery and robbery.

1.3. Expedition results

The scientific results of the Pallas expedition exceeded all expectations. Unique material was collected on zoology, botany, paleontology, geology, physical geography, economics, history, ethnography, culture and life of the peoples of Russia. The collections collected during this trip were sent to St. Petersburg and formed the basis of the collections of the academic Kunstkamera; many of them are still kept in the museums of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and some of them ended up at the University of Berlin. The geographical, geological, botanical, zoological, ethnographic and other materials collected during his travels were subsequently processed by Pallas.

In 1772, in the Krasnoyarsk region, Pallas was shown a 680-kilogram iron-stone block, which, by order of the traveler, was sent to St. Petersburg and now adorns the meteorite department of the Mineralogical Museum named after Academician A. E. Fersman of the Academy of Sciences. This largest siderolite (stone-iron meteorite, or pallasite) in Russia is called “Krasnoyarsk”, or sometimes “Pallas iron”.

During the expedition, Pallas discovered and described many new species of mammals, birds, fish, insects and other animals, including the lancelet, which he mistook for a mollusk. He also examined the fossil remains of buffalo, mammoth and woolly rhinoceros.

The journey also had enormous practical significance. It provided information about the unique natural resources of Eastern Siberia and Altai, which were almost unknown before. Pallas also spoke about the needs of the peoples living there. For modern science, the fact that Pallas described the regions of Russia, its fields, steppes, forests, rivers, lakes and mountains, when they had practically not yet experienced the “transformative” influence of man and were abundantly populated by animal species, many of which have disappeared, is of lasting value within a few decades (for example, the wild Tarpan horse).

The results of the scientific exploit of Pallas and his assistants were summarized by him in numerous works published in Latin, German and Russian in St. Petersburg and later translated into English in Edinburgh and London and into French in Paris:

“Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Rußischen Reichs in den Jahren 1768-1773” (German), or “Journey through different provinces of the Russian state”, published first in three volumes in German (St. Petersburg, 1771-1776), then in Russian ( 1773-1778) and English (1802) languages, in which, among numerous information about Russia, a surprisingly accurate description of more than 250 species of animals that lived on its territory is given;

“Sammlungen historischer Nachrichten über die Mongolischen Völkerschaften” (German) (“Collections of historical information about the Mongolian peoples”, St. Petersburg, 1776-1801);

“Neue nordische Beiträge zur physikalischen und geographischen Erd- und Völkerbeschreibung, Naturgeschichte und Ökonomie” (German) (“New northern reports on the physical and geographical description of the land and peoples”, St. Petersburg and Leipzig, 1781-1796, in 7 volumes) and etc.

These works were highly appreciated by Pallas's contemporaries and became a source of valuable and detailed information about the resources of the Russian Empire of that time for enlightened people in Russia and other countries.

In 1771–1772, according to several...

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Abstract >> History

He received in honor of the German naturalist Peter Pallas, who opened the Pallas's cat on the coast...

Peter-Simon Pallas is a famous Russian naturalist and traveler, academician and professor of natural history at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, a member of many domestic and foreign scientific societies, the London and Roman Academies of Sciences. Born on September 22, 1741 in Germany, in the family of a professor of medicine. Peter-Simon's father, according to contemporaries, was a good practical doctor; he wanted to see his son also be a doctor.

Peter-Simon received his initial education at home. Father

paid special attention to foreign languages, and the future scientist, in addition to his native German, studied Latin, French and English from childhood. Then Peter-Simon studied at the gymnasium and, from the age of thirteen, began attending lectures at the Berlin Medical-Surgical College, where the leading physicians and naturalists of that time taught.

Pallas had an early interest in scientific work. While still a high school student, he conducted a series of observations on some insects and conducted experiments with them. At the same time, he developed an original system for classifying birds based on beak shape. Even then, the independent thinking of the future scientist was evident.

After defending his dissertation, P.-S. Pallas goes to England. His father ordered him to familiarize himself with the activities of famous hospitals, but the young scientist devoted most of his time to communicating with English naturalists and studying their rich collections. To become better acquainted with marine flora and fauna, Pallas made a number of trips to the sea coast, collected collections and compiled descriptions of marine plants and animals.

His father tried in every possible way for Peter-Simon to connect his life with medicine and medical practice, but the young man did not feel any particular inclination towards this activity; he was attracted to natural science, or, as it was then called, “natural history.” This area then included an extensive complex of natural sciences - geography, geology, zoology, botany, etc. Their goals included the study of the origin, patterns of development and existence of nature, taxonomy of the animal and plant world. In terms of the breadth of interests, character and spiritual inclinations, extensive knowledge and methods of work, P.-S. Pallas was the classic embodiment of encyclopedism, characteristic of the greatest scientists of the 18th century.

To make your dreams come true, P.-S. Pallas leaves for Holland, where he obtained a position as Prussian resident in The Hague. At that

At that time in Holland the natural sciences were highly respected. Holland was a major colonial power with ties to various parts of the world. This is precisely what attracted P.-S. Pallas - he had long wanted to travel to such distant countries as America and India. He set out to study the nature of remote countries, their flora and fauna, as well as the life of the native peoples. He found support from some scientists and influential persons, among whom the powerful Prince of Orange deserves special mention. The young scientist stayed in Holland for three years, but was unable to fulfill his dream of traveling and returned to Berlin.

During his stay in Holland, P.-S. Pallas wrote a number of works on zoology, among which his work on the description of corals and sponges was especially interesting. Before that, they were considered plants, and P.-S. Pallas proved their belonging to the animal kingdom. P.-S. Pallas is a supporter of the evolutionary theory of the development of life on Earth, and he is rightfully considered one of the predecessors of Charles Darwin. Thanks to these works P.-S. Pallas gained European fame. But in his homeland he had neither the means nor the opportunity to successfully continue his scientific activities.

In 1766 P.-S. Pallas got married. In the same year, he received notification that he had been elected academician and professor of natural history at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and the highest invitation on behalf of Catherine II to come to Russia for permanent work.

In June 1767 P.-S. Pallas and his wife left Berlin and arrived in St. Petersburg on July 30. A week later, Pallas concluded an official contract in which the scope of his responsibilities was precisely defined: “During his service at the Academy of Sciences, he promises to zealously try to correct positions related to his profession, invent something new in his science, submitting essays for Academic Commentaries over time and to teach correctly in his science the pupils or students assigned to him; Moreover, he should be at the Academic natural science office and try to increase it with worthy things.”

At that time, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences was preparing a large expedition. Immediately after arriving in Russia P.-S. Pallas became the leader of one of his detachments.

From the first years of its existence, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences set itself the task of organizing expeditions to various regions of Russia for a variety of research. So, in 1727-1730. The first academic expedition was carried out to Arkhangelsk and the Kola Peninsula. The Academy of Sciences took an active part in the First Kamchatka Expedition of Vitus

Bering, which took place in 1725-1730, was the organizer of the Second Kamchatka Expedition, carried out in 1733-1743. A number of expeditions followed. Preparations for astronomical and “physical” expeditions were in full swing by the time Pallas arrived in St. Petersburg. The Geographical Department of the Academy of Sciences and other academic institutions took part in the development of the routes and research plan; the Free Economic Society, the Medical College, the Berg College and the Commerce College were asked and presented their views. If at first the main goal of the expedition was astronomical observations, then later the goals of the expedition were significantly expanded. The tasks of complex geographical research came to the fore. One of the important activities of the Academy of Sciences was the observation of the transit of Venus in front of the solar disk, expected on June 3, 1769. But, in addition to purely astronomical observations, the expedition was entrusted with the task of carrying out versatile geographical and natural scientific research. The government was interested primarily in obtaining information necessary for practical use in administrative and economic activities. In accordance with this, the most economically important provinces were chosen - Kazan, Orenburg, Astrakhan.

The expedition consisted of five detachments that worked completely independently. A general instruction was drawn up for everyone, defining the tasks and content of the work.

By the spring of 1768, the detachments of academic expeditions were completed. Six astronomical detachments set out specifically to observe Venus, five geographical ones were divided into three Orenburg and two Astrakhan, although their activities were by no means limited to these geographical boundaries.

The First Orenburg Expedition was headed by P.-S. Pallas; Captain N.P. Rychkov, the son of Pyotr Rychkov, and “school students” Vasily Zuev and Nikita Sokolov traveled with him and did a lot on their own.

The second Orenburg expedition was led by I. I. Lepekhin, one of his assistants was a “school student”, in the future - academician Nikolai Ozeretskovsky.

The third Astrakhan expedition was led by Samuil Gmelin, the nephew of I. G. Gmelin.

The fourth Astrakhan expedition was led by Johann Gildenstedt.

The fifth expedition was also called Orenburg, it was led first by Johann Falk, and later, due to his illness, by Johann Gottlieb

Georgi. Each of the leaders had several assistants, mainly from among the “school students”; some of them turned out to be quite mature independent researchers. Expeditions were sent for three to four years.

Detachment P.-S. Pallas was considered the main one in the Orenburg expedition, and he himself was essentially the general leader of the entire expedition, since I. I. Lepekhin was younger in academic rank than him, and I. P. Falk, although he had the title of professor, was already at that time the first signs of the disease were revealed. P.-S. Pallas draws up a detailed “General Travel Plan” for the Orenburg Expedition and outlines the routes of all three detachments for each year, from 1768 to 1772. The route of the first year covered the Volga region from Simbirsk to Tsaritsyn and further to Guryev, the second year - “The eastern shores of the Caspian Sea and the steppes on both sides of the Yaik”, the third year - the Ural Mountains, the Belaya River and the Shet province. The route of the fourth detachment included the Irtysh and Tobol, as well as “the entire country between Ufa and Chusovaya and the mountains between Yekaterinburg and Solikamsk.” In the final year, on the way back, it was planned to survey the area “between the Kama, Vyatka and Volga... Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod.”

Departure of the first two detachments from St. Petersburg P.-S. Pallas scheduled for June. At the beginning of June, the expeditions of I. I. Lepekhin and I. A. Gildenshtedt set off, followed by the detachment of Pallas himself who left St. Petersburg. He presented an impressive spectacle: the leader himself was riding with his wife in a professor's carriage, followed by wagons with schoolchildren, a draftsman, a scarecrow artist, a marksman and a cook; carts with scientific equipment and personal property of travelers.

From St. Petersburg, the expedition’s path lay to Moscow, where its participants met with Academician G. F. Miller, a participant in the Kamchatka expedition of 1733-1743. He told Pallas a lot about his journey, about the peoples of the Volga region, about Siberia. Further, through Vladimir, Kasimov, Murom, Arzamas, Saransk and Penza, the expedition headed to Simbirsk. P.-S. Pallas was in a hurry, hoping to get to the Middle Volga region during the warm season, from where, in fact, his research program was to begin. In the “General Travel Plan”, he determined for himself the following survey area for the first season: “Between Simbirsk and Syzran, also between Simbirsk and Samara, the country lying along the Volga River will be roughly examined; and from Samara he will travel along the Samara River to the Bor or Sarochin fortress.” In Samara, a meeting was planned with the detachment of I.I. Lepekhin, and then a path along the Volga through Saratov to Tsaritsyn and further to the wintering point was planned.

In Simbirsk detachment P.-S. Pallas arrived at the end of September. The roads were bad, the convoy could barely trudge along. On the day of arrival in Simbirsk, a real storm broke out, lasting two days. Then clear days came, and the travelers, having crossed the Volga, moved through the Zakamsky steppes in the direction of Samara, exploring the lands along Cheremshan along the way. Tatars and Mordovians lived there, but most often there were Chuvash villages. Despite the weather conditions, Pallas found an opportunity to get acquainted with the life and culture of local peoples. As a naturalist, he paid great attention to the description of flora and fauna, soils, minerals, domestic animals and methods of caring for them, medicinal plants and folk techniques for making medicines and their use.

In a short period of time, valuable materials were collected on various aspects of the life and culture of the Chuvash and other peoples of the Volga region. Among them is a rich collection of clothing and jewelry. Nowadays it is kept in the State Ethnographic Museum. This is the earliest collection of Chuvash, Mordovian, Tatar and other clothing that has survived to this day.

Items collected by participants in the academic expedition of 1768-1774 were the first exhibits showing the clothing of the Chuvash, Mari, Mordovians, Tatars, Bashkirs and other peoples of Russia; they served and continue to serve as invaluable factual material for ethnology. Today, the importance of these items increases even more, since they are examples of the most ancient embroidered items that have survived to this day. Unfortunately, not all items from Pallas's collection have survived. Of the embroidered items collected among the Chuvash, only one woman's shirt has reached us.

The Academy of Sciences, whose activities were connected with the Kunstkamera, highly appreciated the collecting and museum-exhibition work of P.-S. Pallas, and in 1778 he was awarded a large gold medal.

The most valuable observations and a number of unique sketches related to the social structure, family customs, household rituals, material culture of the Chuvash and other peoples are summarized and presented in the work of P.-S. Pallas “Travel to different provinces of the Russian Empire”, which also used the observations of V. F. Zuev and N. Sokolov. This work is compiled in the form of a travel diary, in which the towns and villages encountered along the route are described.

In this work P.-S. Pallas contains a description of the ethnocultural characteristics of the Trans-Kama (Pricheremshan) group of the lower Chuvash. The reader can find in it information about the “ordinary clothing of the Chuvash female sex”, “the clothing of girls”, “men’s clothing”, descriptions of the appearance, homes, holidays and rituals, religious beliefs and

deities, wedding customs, etc. Pallas was one of the first to note the presence of two ethnographic groups of the Chuvash - “Vireyal” and “Khirdiyal”. Unfortunately, many unique notes by P.-S. Pallas's works are brief and sometimes fragmentary. This is explained by the fact that the deteriorating autumn weather forced the expedition to hurry. At the beginning of October, Pallas’s detachment already enters the Orenburg province and stops for a week in the large village of Spasskoye - the family estate of P. I. Rychkov, the author of “Topography of the Orenburg Province” and “History of the Orenburg Province”. Here, a member of the expedition, N.P. Rychkov, the son of P.I. Rychkov, was waiting for Pallas. N.P. Rychkov was an excellent expert on the Orenburg region, and Pallas could not help but take advantage of his valuable advice.

From Spassky, the expedition’s route lay to the upper reaches of the Sok, Kinel and Samara rivers, where the detachment was mainly engaged in natural science research. Thus, Pallas visited the famous oil spring in the upper reaches of the Baitugan River. By the way, in this area there is the Chuvash village of Baituganovo (Chuvash. Paitukan pç). He was led to the oil spring by a Chuvash guide, who said that the spring does not freeze even in severe frosts, and the oil from it is considered healing. P.-S. Pallas carefully described this source and took oil samples. Then he traveled to the sulfur springs near the Shumbut river and its tributaries. These notes by Pallas were the first information indicating the presence of oil in the Middle Volga region.

Winter came. Pallas decided to stop for the winter and headed to Simbirsk. He spent the winter time putting his notes in order, as well as describing the local region. He was especially attracted by the ruins of Bulgar, the former capital of Volga-Kama Bulgaria, which until then had not been properly described by any scientist.

Unfortunately, P.-S. Pallas arrived in the Bulgars at a very inconvenient time for observations - at the beginning of winter. The Bulgar village disappointed him: a hundred houses in the middle of an open space did not represent anything remarkable. Behind the village lay a field surrounded by a rampart and a ditch. Ancient buildings were placed inside the shaft. A piercing wind was blowing, everything was covered in deep snow. However, P.-S. Pallas walked around all the buildings, made his way inside the dilapidated buildings and examined them; on the gravestones of the old cemetery he discovered many interesting inscriptions made in Arabic writing. Measurements were taken of the surviving buildings, the draftsman N. Dmitriev sketched the contours of the main structures, adding with his imagination what was hidden under the snow. Despite the cold, they were surrounded by a crowd of villagers who told the researchers about local attractions.

P.-S. Pallas managed to make valuable observations and sketches of monuments of Bulgarian antiquity. This scientific information is the earliest; it contains descriptions and drawings of a number of monuments that have not survived to this day, including such significant ones as the “Quadrangle”, “Great Minaret”, “White Chamber” and a number of others. Thus, Pallas reports: “... there are in an irregular quadrangle the ruins of a large stone building with thick corners, which, perhaps, represented a large mosque. This building consists of uneven, poorly hewn, but very densely folded, limestone, wood, wild and gypsum stones, which are confidently laid on the mountainous bank of the Volga...” Pallas also records the dimensions of the rampart and ditch of the fort: “The shaft is at least six long verst,” and the ditch at Pallas, “although it was filled up, was up to three fathoms wide.”

Describing the so-called “Great Minaret”, Pallas writes that inside the courtyard of the Assumption Monastery “the most noble... tower or mizgir is made of hewn stones slightly higher than 12 fathoms in the same pattern and proportion as it is presented on the sixth table under the letter A, and now stands intact. One ascends it via a round staircase of 72 steps, each of which is a Parisian foot high. This staircase was completely repaired and the tower was covered with a wooden lid, on which there is a new Arabic inscription inside. The doors to the tower are made on the midday side and large iron hooks on which the door hung are visible in the wall. Small holes are left in the walls of the tower, through which light passes, and therefore one can see walking along the stairs... The tower stands in the northwestern corner... of the quadrangle.”

This monument collapsed back in 1841, and its material was quickly stolen by local residents. Therefore, the description made by Pallas and the accompanying drawing are of great scientific interest. The same should be said about the detailed description of the grandiose “White Chamber”. P.-S. Pallas records the “White Chamber” not only in the text, but also in the drawings and drawings: a “foundation drawing” (plan) and a “section of the structure” (section) are given. Only the foundation and underground premises of the “White Chamber” have survived to this day, so the descriptions, drawings and drawings of P.-S. Pallas are of exceptional value.

While working at the Bulgar settlement, Pallas found out from local residents that in the surrounding fields in the old days they found a variety of metal jewelry and crafts, including gold and silver, as well as ancient coins, that children still find copper and iron trinkets. Several such finds were brought to Pallas, and he bought them, but at the same time remained confident that the most valuable things were not shown to him. And he bitterly wrote down

wrote in his diary: “What a multitude of local memorable things have already been scattered and fallen into the wrong hands!” As a true scientist, understanding the enormous significance of this historical monument, P.-S. Pallas could not be satisfied with examining the Bulgar settlement. “Due to the severe cold and deliberately deep snow,” he wrote with annoyance, “it was impossible to examine and describe everything in detail... This place, of course, is worthy of being visited in the summer and accurately depicted on paper.” Scientists, however, returned to Simbirsk with quite rich material. During the winter, the surroundings of Simbirsk were also explored. At the end of February P.-S. Pallas sent part of the detachment to Samara, and on March 10 he went there himself.

The second year of the expedition began. Its leader wrote with satisfaction in his diary: “In the pleasant spring time, in the month of April, I had an opportunity to explore this considerable country.” Having traveled around the outskirts of Samara, Pallas took a longer trip on May 3 - he went to Syzran. On the way, in a Mordovian village, he witnessed an ancient wedding and observed the colorful ceremony of the bride’s arrival at the groom’s house.

From Samara P.-S. Pallas sent a large convoy through the Kalmyk steppe to the Yaitsky town, and he himself with a small convoy drove along the Samara fortified line towards Orenburg. In the Buzuluk steppe he managed to meet wild horses, which the Tatars caught for meat. It turns out that in the steppes back in the second half of the 18th century. wild horses could be seen.

From Orenburg P.-S. Pallas made several trips to the surrounding areas - to the Iletsk salt works, to the Orsk fortress, and even five hundred miles away - to Guryev. At the end of July, Pallas went to the lower reaches of the Yaik, he was in a hurry to get to the Yaitsky town. On the steppe roads he met Bashkirs, Kalmyks, and “Kirghiz” (as the Kazakhs were called then). The “Kirghiz” received the guests friendly and treated them to kumis, “of which you cannot drink one cup without feeling hops in your head.”

Thirty versts before Guryev P.-S. Pallas was met by I.I. Lepekhin, who sailed on two boats along the Yaik. The astronomical expeditions of Professor Lowitz and Lieutenant Euler were also in Guryev. Together with Euler, Pallas traveled to Kamenny Island in the Caspian Sea and recorded information about fluctuations in the level of the Caspian Sea. In mid-September, Pallas and his entire caravan moved from the town of Yaitsky to spend the winter in Ufa.

Over the two years of work, the academic expedition teams presented a large variety of materials to the Academy of Sciences. Their value was clear to everyone, but Catherine II wanted to receive international recognition for the success of the expeditions.

Therefore, at the end of 1770 and beginning of 1771. The director of the Academy of Sciences, Count V.G. Orlov, sends letters to the leaders of all detachments demanding that they submit descriptions of the route traveled prepared for publication.

In February 1770 P.-S. Pallas began preparing for the publication of his recordings two years in advance and completed this work at the end of April. His book, “Travel to Various Provinces of the Russian Empire,” published in the same year, contained more than six hundred pages of the description of the trip itself and more than a hundred pages of “Addition,” containing descriptions of animals, birds, insects and plants. Pallas's "Journey" represents the direct testimony of a scientific eyewitness, recorded on the same day. When processing field notes for the book, he corrected only the style, keeping the order of the narrative and the factual material unchanged. Pallas considered the accuracy and truthfulness of descriptions to be the main condition for scientific work, without which work simply ceases to be scientific.

Travels P.-S. Pallas continued in subsequent years. In 1771, his routes mainly ran along the Ural ridge, capturing mainly the Ufa province and the Iset province. The Iset province at that time included a vast region between the Urals and Ob - Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Verkhoturye, Tyumen, Tobolsk. In the Urals, P.-S. Pallas mainly visited metallurgical plants. During 1772, Pallas traveled extensively throughout Siberia. The route of his travels extended from Tomsk through Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk, Chita and Transbaikalia; The expedition reached Kyakhta, the center of Russian-Chinese trade. From Selenginsk, Pallas traveled along the Nerchinsk road to Dauria and visited the Buryat camps.

After completing the travel plan for Southern Siberia, P.-S. Pallas went to St. Petersburg in January 1773. The return journey from Siberia along the Kama, the Urals, the Caspian lowland, and the lower and middle Volga took him a whole year. The scientist could not just drive along the road; he was an inquisitive observer until the last day of the journey - July 30, 1774.

The next 20 years P.-S. Pallas lived in St. Petersburg. Based on his field notes and collections, he wrote a large number of works on zoology, entomology, botany, geography, ethnography and history. Pallas becomes one of the most significant figures in European science. He enjoyed the gratitude and respect of Catherine II herself. Among the members of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Pallas occupied a special position. He stood aloof from the struggle of factions in the academy, did not feel administrative oppression from the directors and could calmly engage in science.

P.-S. Pallas never rested on his laurels and, like a true scientist, always strived for new research. Already in 1776, he took an active part in organizing a new large expedition to insufficiently explored regions of Russia. They were presented with an original note entitled: “Review of travel that still needs to be done in the Asian part of the Russian Empire.” This was a scientifically based project for a new large-scale expedition. By the way, I. I. Lepekhin and I. Gildenshtedt submitted their projects at that time, but not a single expedition was carried out according to these projects.

The Academy of Sciences returned to the issue of organizing new expeditions to Eastern Siberia again after three years, and the date for departure of the expeditions was also scheduled - the spring of 1780. P.-S. Pallas again draws up a detailed project, in which he emphasizes the scientific and national significance of this enterprise and gives practical advice on organizing research. But this expedition also did not take place.

In 1786, a round-the-world expedition of the Russian squadron was planned under the command of Captain G.I. Mulovsky, which was tasked with protecting Russia’s rights to the lands discovered by Russian navigators. P.-S. Pallas was asked to draw up instructions for the expedition. The voyage route had already been planned, ship commanders had been appointed, and the departure date had been announced. But a war with Turkey began, a war with Sweden was expected, and the expedition was postponed. Thus, the dreams of P.-S. Pallas's tales of long journeys collapsed one after another. But he did not lose heart and devoted all his knowledge and energy to theoretical research.

By the age of fifty, P.-S. Pallas had enormous authority in scientific circles, a strong position in life, a high rank of state councilor, wealth and, finally, proximity to the court that could satisfy any vanity. But the cherished dream of P.-S. Pallas had to leave St. Petersburg, since desk work did not give complete satisfaction to the naturalist researcher. At the end of 1792, he turned to Catherine II with a request to allow him to settle down to rest from many years of work, improve his poor health and complete the main work of his life - a description of the animals of the European part of Russia and Siberia - somewhere in the south of Russia. But he could not name a specific place and decided to travel through those places in order to determine his future place of residence. The Academy of Sciences instructed him to compile a description of the trip, and on February 1, 1793 P.-S. Pallas, his wife and fourteen-year-old daughter left St. Petersburg. His attention was drawn to Crimea, annexed to Russia about ten years ago. Pallas spent the winter in Symphos

Ropol, and in the spring he went on a trip to the Crimea. Subsequently, based on travel records, he published a detailed two-volume “Description of a trip to the southern provinces of the Russian state in 1793-1794” (St. Petersburg, 1799, 1803).

While traveling around Crimea, P.-S. Pallas's desire to settle in this fertile land grew stronger. Returning to St. Petersburg, P.-S. Pallas presented to the Academy of Sciences the materials of his journey and a request from Catherine II to grant him land in the Crimea. The request was granted. In addition, Pallas was granted ten thousand rubles “for establishment.” He also retained his academic salary with the condition that he would continue his scientific work in Crimea.

In the fall of 1795 P.-S. Pallas moved to Crimea and lived there for 15 years. These years were filled with work to complete the work begun and research into the flora and fauna, geology, history and economy of Crimea. Here P.-S. Pallas completed his major work - “Russian-Asian Zoography”. Having decided to create a complete description of the flora of Crimea, he collects a huge herbarium, makes many sketches, and transplants plants characteristic of Crimea into his garden...

But over the years it became increasingly clear that the hope for the climate of Crimea was not justified. P.-S. Pallas suffered constantly from fever. The dream of a quiet life did not come true either - litigation soon began with neighbors over disputed plots of land.

In 1810 P.-S. Pallas decides to return to his homeland and, having sold his Crimean estates, leaves for Germany. A year later, on September 8, 1811, he died in Berlin.

Scientific works of P.-S. Pallas received universal recognition during his lifetime both in Russia and abroad; many of his works were published in Germany, England, France, Italy, and Holland. In terms of its versatility, P.-S. Pallas is reminiscent of the encyclopedic scholars of antiquity and the Middle Ages. In his numerous printed works, and there are more than 170 of them, P.-S. Pallas appears as a tireless scientist, a traveler who covered many areas of knowledge.

Thanks to the works of P.-S. Pallas, the world learned about the life and way of life of the then practically unknown peoples of Eastern Russia, including the Chuvash. Pallas collected valuable materials on various aspects of the life and culture of the Chuvash people, the scientific and educational significance of which is increasingly increasing over time. This anthology includes excerpts from his five-volume major work “Travel through different provinces of the Russian Empire”, dedicated to a description of the life and culture of the Chuvash and some other peoples of the Middle Volga region.

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 exertion of strength, eternal 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 on 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.

PALLAS Peter Simon is one of the most outstanding naturalists of all countries and times; genus. in Berlin September 22, 1741, d. in the same place on September 8, 1811. Being, thus, a foreigner by birth, Pallas, however, lived in Russia for 43 years and was the beauty of our Academy of Sciences. He devoted almost his entire life to the comprehensive study of his second fatherland, and therefore we can proudly rank him among the Russian scientists, among whom, in terms of the depth of his knowledge, the breadth of scientific interests and tasks, as well as the extraordinary gift and accuracy of observations, he ranks one of the most important places.

His father Simon Pallas, a famous surgeon, was from East Prussia. Young Peter Simon was destined to follow in the footsteps of his father. His extraordinary talent manifested itself at an early age: as a 13-year-old boy, he began listening to lectures at the Berlin Medical-Surgical College, and in 1758, when he was only 17 years old, he had already successfully passed an exam from an anatomical course. After spending another two years at the universities in Halle, Leiden and Göttingen, Pallas received the degree of Doctor of Medicine at the end of 1760, presenting a dissertation on worms in humans and some animals. Then the 19-year-old doctor of medicine went to London, where, at the request of his father, he, in fact, had to visit hospitals, but in fact diligently visited the excellent natural history collections of the city and entered into personal relations with the most outstanding naturalists there. Returning to Berlin in 1762, Pallas the following year received permission from his parents to move to Holland to find a suitable place for himself; but, despite intensive scientific studies, he failed to get such a place, and in 1766 he returned to his parents' house.

In this last year, two works by Pallas were published in Gaga, which attracted the attention of the scientific world to him; These works, which dealt with the anatomy and taxonomy of lower animals, immediately revealed rare observation and insight in the young author. Thanks to this, the name of Pallas immediately became very famous, and when Empress Catherine II, who decided to equip an expedition to explore Russia in natural history, turned to Leipzig Professor Ludwig for a recommendation for a particularly knowledgeable natural scientist as the leader of this expedition, he settled on Pallas. The Academy of Sciences on December 22, 1766 elected him to its membership as a professor of natural history; At first he refused, however, so that it was already in mind to choose Jos instead. Gertner; but in April 1767 he expressed his consent, and on April 23 of the same year, Pallas’s election was confirmed by the Academy.

In the summer of 1767, he moved to St. Petersburg and immediately began drawing up plans and instructions for the travels planned by the Empress throughout European Russia, the Caucasus and Siberia. At first, Pallas intended to participate in the expedition that the Academy, at the invitation of the Royal British Society of Sciences, equipped to Kamchatka to observe the passage of Venus before the sun in 1769; but subsequently it was decided to equip a special expedition, at the head of which Pallas was to stand, who took upon himself the development of a general plan for it, the distribution of individual regions between the participants, etc. In addition to Pallas, academicians from Güldenstätt took part in this memorable expedition, which lasted six years , S. G. Gmelin, Lepekhin, Falk, Georgi; with each of them there were several “students” of the Academy. Almost a whole year passed in preparation for the expedition, and only at the end of June 1768 did Pallas set off from St. Petersburg.

We will not dwell here on the details of this unusually fruitful journey, during which Pallas managed to discover and communicate to the Academy extremely remarkable objects from all kingdoms of nature; Let us name, for example, the famous sample of native iron (“Pallas Iron”), found on the banks of the Vilyui, the head of a rhinoceros, etc. Let us outline only the main features of the paths traversed by Pallas.

Through Moscow, Vladimir, Kasimov, Murom, Arzamas and Penza, Pallas traveled to Simbirsk, where he stayed for the winter. He often stopped along the way, made numerous excursions from his camps, compiled collections everywhere and often on the spot, in addition to an accurate travel journal, which he kept throughout his entire journey, described the curious objects he came across. So, for example, already from Vladimir he sent to the Academy a box with minerals and fossils he had collected, as well as a description of a river sponge found near Vladimir. During the winter in Simbirsk, Pallas developed his travel journal, so that already in March 1769, the first part of his journey was read at emergency meetings of the Academy. At the same time, he left Simbirsk and through Stavropol and the Samara Luka headed to Samara, and from there through Syzran to Serny Gorodok; returning to Samara, he drove through Borsk to Orenburg and to the Iletsk defense; Having examined the deposits of rock salt there, Pallas went to Yaitsky Gorodok, the center of the Yaitsky Cossacks, where he became acquainted with their economy, mainly with fishing in the river. Ural; along this latter he then drove to Guryev, where he stocked up on information about fishing in the Caspian Sea; finally, from Guryev Pallas followed the steppe to Ufa, where he spent the winter from 1769 to 1770. In addition to numerous observations of the rocks, plants and animals of this region, Pallas also managed to study the life of the three tribes inhabiting it, namely: the Yaik Cossacks, the Kirghiz and the Kalmyks. During his winter in Ufa, he completed the development of the first volume of his travels, which appeared in 1771. At the same time, he compiled a description of 8 hitherto unknown species of mammals and birds, which he was able to observe in 1769.

In mid-May 1770, Pallas left Ufa and headed to the “Iset Province”; he devoted the whole summer to exploring the Ural Mountains and their mineral wealth; by the way, he visited Yekaterinburg and the mining factories there; having then made several more small trips, among other things, along p. Ture, settled for the winter in Chelyabinsk (“Chelyaba”). Around the New Year, Pallas traveled to Tobolsk and Tyumen, from where he returned to Chelyabinsk. In mid-April 1771, he went to Omsk, where he arrived around May 20; from here, through Altai, he traveled to Tomsk, and then to Krasnoyarsk, where he stayed for the winter and prepared the second volume of his journey for publication. In his letters to the Secretary of the Academy of Sciences A. Euler, Pallas complains about the poor state of his health and refuses his planned trip to China. In general, he lost heart this winter. Already from Tomsk he writes to Euler that the entire journey of 1771 is almost a continuous chain of failures and troubles; and in a letter to Falk from Krasnoyarsk, he admits that he has lost all desire for further travel and considers himself a Siberian exile. But thanks to the improvement of his health, as well as the arrival of Georgi, he regained his courage. Already at the beginning of March 1772, Pallas set out on a further journey: through Irkutsk and Lake Baikal (on ice) he traveled to Selenginsk, and from there to Kyakhta; upon returning to Selenginsk, he visited Dauria, where he observed the life of the steppe Tungus there, heavily mixed with the Buryats and Mongols; Having returned again to Selenginsk, he again visited Kyakhta, and then passed through Irkutsk back to Krasnoyarsk, where he spent part of the winter. At the end of January 1773, Pallas left Krasnoyarsk and headed through Tomsk and Tara back to European Russia. From Sarapul, where he stopped for some time, he made an excursion to Kazan, and upon his return he headed south and, having passed through the Ural steppe, reached Tsaritsyn in early September. Here he spent the winter and part of the spring of 1774, during which he made several trips, for example. to Astrakhan; Having also visited Mount Bogdo and the adjacent lake, he returned through Moscow to St. Petersburg, where he arrived on July 30th.

So, this memorable journey lasted more than six years. The hardships and hardships associated with him had a detrimental effect on the health of Pallas, who (as he himself notes at the end of the description of his journey) returned with an exhausted body and graying hair at the 33rd year of his life. Due to the terrible frosts, in which Pallas happened to observe the freezing of mercury in the thermometer, he once froze his heels in his room. But, despite all the hardships of temperature, despite persistent inflammation of the eyes, often recurring dysentery and various other diseases, he tirelessly pursued the task he had set for himself, which was a comprehensive study of the countries he visited.

The literary fruit of this journey was the famous three-volume description of it, published in St. Petersburg, in German, in 1771-1776 (the Russian translation was subsequently published). This work, despite the fact that it was published more than a hundred years ago, still constitutes an extremely rich treasury not only for geologists, botanists and zoologists, but equally for ethnographers, rural and forest owners. The mass of unusually accurate observations of objects and phenomena from all kingdoms of nature described here not only significantly expanded the horizons of science, but, at the same time, gave the government the opportunity to become more closely acquainted with both the needs and requirements of the population, as well as with the abundant funds at its disposal. nature of Russia to meet these needs. So. This fruitful journey had not only scientific, but also extremely important practical significance. Actually, for science, this description is especially important, because it concerns a vast region in the form in which it was 125 years ago, that is, at a time when the primeval forests and steppes of eastern Russia and Siberia, with their flora and fauna, have not yet had time to undergo that destructive and modifying influence of man, which is so strongly manifested at the present time.

The further fruit of this memorable journey is a number of important works and monographs, the development of which Pallas began upon his return to St. Petersburg. Already in 1776, the first volume of his famous collection of historical information about the Mongolian tribes (“Sammlungen historischer Nachrichten über die Mongolischen Völkerschaften”) appeared, while the second volume of this major work was published only 25 years later, i.e., in 1801 . It constitutes a rich source of important and hitherto unknown information in Europe, not only for historians, but, in particular, for anthropologists. No less clear evidence of Pallas’s amazing work force and insightful mind should be considered his description of new rodents (“Novae species Quadrupedum e Glirium ordine”), which appeared in 1778. Until that time, such a monograph did not exist on any department of mammals, and even now it should be recognized as truly exemplary; Every zoologist working in the department of rodents again draws from it important information, which is not limited to one accurate description of individual species, but concerns many extremely interesting details on the anatomy and physiology of these animals; In the latter respect, experiments on the body temperature of rodents during their winter hibernation are especially interesting.

Pallas's inquisitiveness embraced, as we see, very diverse areas of science. In the eighties, he developed Russian flora, which, unfortunately, remained unfinished. The first volume of this beautifully published Flora rossica was published in 1784, and the second in 1788. At the same time, on behalf of Empress Catherine II, Pallas compiled “Comparative dictionaries of all languages ​​and dialects,” based on materials collected mostly by the Empress herself (Part I was published in 1787, Part II in 1789). In the early 80s, the tireless Pallas began to publish a magazine under the title: “Neue Nordische Beiträge”, where he published a very large number of both his own articles and his translations from Russian, partly handwritten news; After the publication of 4 volumes (from 1781 to 1783), there was a long break, and only from 1793 to 1796 three more volumes were published. Moreover, during the 70s and 80s Pallas published a whole host of smaller works and articles. Of these, the most important are: 1) Memoir on the variability of animals (“Mémoires sur la variation des animaux”), published in 1780, and 2) Observations on the structure of mountains and the changes that have taken place on the globe, mainly in relation to Russia (“ Observations sur la formation des montagnes et les changesments arrivés au globe, particulierement à l'égard de l'empire Russe"), printed in 1777.

Such intensive scientific activity of our scientist, in the presence of poor health and severely shaken during a long journey, should have led to exhaustion of his strength. The noise of the capital and the bustle of St. Petersburg social life weighed on Pallas, and he decided to travel again, this time to the southern provinces, especially to the Crimea, which had only recently been annexed to Russia. In February 1793, he left St. Petersburg, accompanied by his wife and daughter, as well as his beloved talented draftsman Chr. G. Geisler from Leipzig. When crossing the river. Klyazma, its ice was so weak that Pallas, who got out of the carriage, fell into the hole up to half his body, and then was forced, without changing his clothes, to travel 37 miles to the city of Sudogda. As a result of this adventure, his health was completely undermined, and for the rest of his life he suffered from the consequences of this cold. Having traveled through Penza, Saratov, Tsaritsyn and Sarepta to Astrakhan, he made several botanical excursions through the surrounding dry steppes and, returning to Sarepta, settled there for a while, attracted by the richness of the forms of the local plants and insects. Having then traveled again to Astrakhan, Pallas went from there to the Caucasian line, visited various mineral springs and Mount Beshtau, and then headed to the Sea of ​​Azov, examined the expensive ruins of Madzhar and crossed to the Crimea. At the end of October, he arrived in Simferopol and stayed with his friend Habliz, the local vice-governor, in whose house he spent the winter. At the beginning of March 1794, he began to travel around the peninsula and continued these detours until July.

The delights of the nature of Crimea captivated him so much that, returning from there in September to St. Petersburg, he dreamed of settling there forever and in solitude completely devoting himself to the development and completion of the scientific works he had conceived and begun. Empress Catherine, having learned about the desire of the scientist she highly respected, mercifully fulfilled this desire: the Empress granted Pallas several estates in the Crimea, as well as a house in Simferopol, and another 10,000 rubles for its construction. In August 1795, he moved completely to this last city, and the house he inhabited soon became a gathering point for all travelers, both foreign and Russian. Of the first, we can name Clarke, who acquired from Pallas his significant botanical collections, which later passed to Lambert; and among the Russian travelers, he was visited, by the way, by Izmailov, who (in his “Travel to Midday Russia” in 1799) reported several notes about the personality of Pallas and his private life.

Here, in Crimea, Pallas continued his scientific research with the enthusiasm of a young man. Having already published in 1795 in French a natural history description of Tauride (“Tableau physique et topographique de la Tauride”), translated several times into German and Russian, Pallas then (in 1799 and 1801) published a two-volume description of his journey, completed in 1793 and 1794. Published in German (“Bemerkungen auf einer Reise in die südlichen Statthalterschaften des Kussischen Reichs in den Jahren 1793 und 1794”) and translated into French and English, this remarkable work remained without a Russian translation. (Only some of its chapters relating to the Crimea itself were recently translated by Mrs. M. Slavich and appeared in the “Notes of I. Odessk. General history and ancient history,” in volumes XII and XIII, 1881 and 1883 years). But Pallas’s most important concern during the period spent in Crimea was the development of his long-planned fauna of Russia, for which he had been diligently collecting materials for many years. From Simferopol, he repeatedly reported to the Academy of Sciences about the progress of the development of this remarkable work, the publication of which was delayed by various unfavorable circumstances, most importantly by the dishonest act of the draftsman Geisler, who pawned the tables of drawings he had made for this work in Germany. Finally, the text was printed in 1811, that is, in the very year of Pallas’s death; but this work was published only twenty years later under the title: “Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica” (Petropoli, 1831, three volumes 4° and an atlas of drawings in fol.). There is a report about the fate of the publication of this famous work by Academician K. M. Baer, ​​who was specially sent by the Academy of Sciences to Leipzig to rescue the drawings pledged by Geisler. This report was printed in 1831.

Pallas lived in Crimea, alternately in Simferopol and Sudak. The estates that belonged to him repeatedly involved him in long-term litigation, caused, among other things, by the fact that the property rights of the neighboring Tatars were not established precisely enough. Some information about this is in the article by A. Solntsev: “Pallas in the Crimea” (“Ancient and New Russia”, 1876, vol. I, pp. 279-289, with a portrait). Having separated peacefully from his second wife (to whom he had been married since 1786), Pallas in 1808 moved to his beloved daughter from his first marriage, the widow of Lieutenant General Baron Wimpfep, who lived in Crimea, on his estate Kalmuk-Karka. Here, in solitude, he lived happily for two years, tirelessly continuing his scientific studies. But, being completely cut off there from the scientific world and greatly concerned about the fate of his fauna, in January 1810 he turned to the Academy of Sciences with a request to grant him an indefinite leave to Berlin, from where he could better oversee the production and engraving of drawings for his “Zoographia” " In March, the requested leave with full salary was granted, and at the end of April Pallas, accompanied by his daughter, left the Crimea and traveled through Brody and Breslau to Berlin, where he arrived in June. In Berlin, Pallas lived quietly for more than a year, highly respected by the scientists there, who (including his biographer, the famous helminthologist K. A. Rudolphi) visited him often in the evenings and enjoyed the inexhaustible source of his knowledge and the depth of his thoughts. In the summer of 1811, severe attacks of dysentery, from which P. had long suffered, recurred, and on September 8 (August 27) he died in the arms of his beloved daughter. He was buried in Berlin, at the Halley Cemetery, where in 1852, with the combined funds of the St. Petersburg and Berlin Academies of Sciences, a monument was erected over his grave.

Since all the attention of contemporaries focused on Pallas’s scientific activities, very little information has been preserved about other aspects of his outstanding personality, namely, about his character and home life. Those who knew Pallas personally, for example. the famous helminthologist Rudolphi and the traveler Izmailov praise the evenness and cheerfulness of his character and note that he loved pleasure only as a break from hard mental work. From the fact that Pallas never quarreled with his rivals in science, Cuvier draws the conclusion that he was of a gentle disposition.

To this we can add that Pallas was distinguished by extraordinary energy and willpower, which had the opportunity to show itself more than once during his long journeys, which were accompanied by terrible difficulties, deprivations and dangers. The character of Pallas is also remarkable for his humanity and sense of justice. This latter once led him (in 1784) to a sharp clash with the then president of the Academy of Sciences, Princess Dashkova, who autocratically excluded Zuev from among the adjuncts of the Academy. Pallas, outraged by such an unfair and willful act, stood up for his comrade and testified in writing both to his zeal for science and to his successes during his time as an adjunct of the Academy; At the same time, he (at a meeting on February 23) proposed to raise the question whether Zuev had not satisfactorily performed all the duties of an adjunct? But this proposal was not accepted by the majority of members. In one of the following meetings (March 18), Princess Dashkova ordered that it be stated that she was very puzzled by Pallas’s protest and wanted Messrs. Academics immediately spoke out: are they really unhappy with her personality and her management? All, with the exception of two (Pallas and Lexell), spoke in favor of the princess. Pallas demanded that a reasoned explanation of it (written in French in his own hand) be attached to the protocol, which included, among other things, the following: “Pour moi j'ai toujours sû respecter dans la personne de Madame la Princesse et de ses Prédécesseurs, les Chefs préposés à l'Académie par nôtre grande Souveraine; mais je n’ai pas renoncé au droit, que ma place d’Académicien me donne, de dire mon sentiment librement dans les délibérations académiques.” (Taken from the minutes of meetings of the Academy of Sciences, stored in its archives. In the end, Zuev remained an adjunct of the Academy). This case proves, in the best possible way, not only a sense of justice, but also a significant degree of civic courage that Pallas possessed.

While it is not possible to list here the very numerous works and articles of Pallas (the most important of them, however, are given above), I will try to give in a few lines a general picture of his fruitful scientific activity. (Until modern times, there was no complete list of Pallas’s scientific works; I recently published such a list in the “Journal of the Ministry of Public Education,” 1895, April). Already from the above it is clear that Pallas’s activity is distinguished by its extraordinary versatility: indeed, it embraced many departments of zoology and botany, mineralogy and geology, physical geography (with the inclusion of meteorology), agriculture and forestry (together with technology), medicine, ethnography, numismatics and archeology, linguistics. To this should also be added descriptions of his many years of travel, the publication of two magazines, translations compiled by him, as well as works by other authors published by Pallas. In addition, on some of the named departments (especially zoology, botany and ethnography), he published a number of large and most thorough works. Let us preface here an assessment of Pallas’s scientific activity, which was given by our famous zoologist and traveler N.A. Severtsov: “Pallas with his techniques in science, bold ideas expressed about the connection of all three kingdoms of nature - ideas finally developed in our century, his observations of the life of animals and comparative anatomical works is ahead of the scientists of the 19th century. The accuracy of his research and the correctness of his views place him next to Cuvier, but the reform introduced by this latter in zoology seemed to obscure the merit of primacy in this regard, which undoubtedly belongs to Pallas. Close, as Cuvier himself admitted, to making a reform in zoology, he actually made it in geology, or - as it was then called - in the theory of the earth. He was the founder of paleontology; he established such strong views on the significance of meteorological, soil and climatic influences on the phenomena of the periodic life of animals that little significant was added to this after him. In his spirit and in his tireless activity, Pallas is also similar to Cuvier; but we must not forget that Cuvier had already entered the ground that had been strongly developed by Pallas, Müller, Saussure and others” (see Severtsov’s master’s thesis: “Periodic phenomena in the life of animals, birds and reptiles of the Voronezh province”).

The first and last in time, and at the same time the main subject of his research, were animals. While still a 15-17 year old boy, he independently and diligently studied worms and insects; At the same time he drew a new schedule for the birds. In his “Elenchus zoophytorum” he first expressed the remarkable and now generally accepted idea that the entire system of organisms can be imagined in the form of a tree, which from its very root is divided into two trunks (plants and animals), which sometimes approach each other. One of these trunks (embracing animals) runs from zoophytes, through molluscs, to fish, sending out a large lateral branch for insects; from fish the trunk passes through amphibians to mammals, from which again a large lateral branch extends for birds. If we compare this witty view with the opinions that prevailed at that time (in the 60s of the last century), it is easy to see how far its author was ahead of his contemporaries. Particularly important were his studies on the class of worms, which at that time (and even after the work of Linnaeus) was a mixture of heterogeneous animals belonging to different types. Pallas, still a 19-year-old boy, was the first to figure out this confusion and isolated organisms alien to him from the class of worms. With surprise, the generation of that time saw in this young scientist the combined merits of two famous naturalists: the insight of Buffon and the accuracy of Daubanton.

Some other highly remarkable works of Pallas on zoology (for example, on rodents) were mentioned above. Among his earliest works, mention should be made of the insect fauna of Mark-Brandenburg (“Fauna Insectorum Marchica”), which remained unpublished. In general, in his youth, Pallas made a lot of observations on insects, on their development, transformations, etc. This includes an extremely interesting (and subsequently completely confirmed) observation on parthenogenesis in two small lepidoptera from the family of psychids. And while he was in Russia, P. did not lose sight of insects: he published several editions of images and descriptions of new Russian insects (mainly beetles), but his voluminous manuscript entitled: “Insecta Rossica”, which is the property of the Berlin Zoological Museum, unfortunately, remained unreleased.

Having published a number of articles about fish, amphibians, birds and, in particular, about mammals, which he was able to discover and observe during his many years of travel through European Russia and Siberia, Pallas developed his famous “Zoographia Rosso” for over 30 years. Asiatica”, which was already mentioned above. This immortal monument of his research on the animals of Russia, which has nothing similar in all subsequent zoological literature, combines everything that was known up to that time (mostly from the research of Pallas himself) about vertebrates: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish found within the then borders of Russia. This invaluable treasure, which has to be constantly resorted to and will have to be resorted to by several future generations, has accumulated a whole mass of curious evidence concerning the anatomy, morphology and biology of several hundred animals, their way of life, geographical distribution, etc.; On top of all this, thousands of folk names of animals in numerous foreign languages ​​and dialects, used throughout the vast space occupied by Russia, are very carefully collected here.

What Pallas accomplished in terms of botany, in terms of its importance, of course, cannot be compared with his zoological works; He became inspired to study flora only during his long journey, when he had to observe many interesting plants that were not found in the wild in the fields and forests of Europe. He conceived a large publication of the flora of Russia, but managed to publish only two parts of it, dealing almost exclusively with wild trees and shrubs. In addition, Pallas described many new plant species discovered by himself or other travelers, mainly in Siberia. Several families and genera were treated monographically by him, such as, for example: species of the genus Astragalus, rhubarb species, and also solyanka.

Pallas published only a few works on mineralogy and geology, but one of them, as we have already said, was destined to revolutionize the then young science of geology. Thanks to his careful observation of the structure of the Ural Mountains and Altai, he noticed that granites always lie in the middle of the mountains, above them are shales, and on top of these last are limestones. Cuvier (G. Cuvier, “Eloges historiques”), followed by Severtsov, notes that this significant fact, first expressed by Pallas (in a memoir read in 1777 at a meeting of the I. Academy of Sciences in the presence of the Swedish king Gustav III), gave the starting point for all modern geology. On mineralogy, including metal processing, Pallas published several articles, of which the most remarkable are: 1) on the mass of native iron found in Siberia, and 2) on ancient ore mines in Siberia and their similarity with the Hungarian ones.

In physical geography, the following are especially important: 1) “Physical and topographical description of the Tauride province” (in 1795) and 2) an article “about Russian discoveries on the seas between Asia and America” (in the “Monthology of History and Geography” for 1781 .). This also includes most of the information contained in the descriptions of Pallas’s double travels.

The program of Pallas's great journey included not only scientific observation of objects from all three kingdoms of nature, but also research into the use of these objects in the national economy. We saw that Pallas, during his travels, studied with equal interest the occurrence of, for example, rock salt and other minerals, plants used in agriculture or medicine (for example, rhubarb species and silk plants), as well as fishing and other branches of agricultural industry. and forestry. The archives of the Academy of Sciences contain Pallas's remaining unpublished work on Russian forestry (“Kurzgefasste Anweisung zur Forstwirtschaft für das Russische Reich”). This wonderful manuscript is divided into two main sections: 1) A physical and economic description of trees and handicrafts growing wild in the Russian Empire, and 2) about the main subjects of forestry, namely: about the economic use of forest plantations, about their careful maintenance and propagation, and about side products for forest conservation. It is very interesting that Pallas, even then (in the 70s of the last century), when no one in our country was thinking about saving forests, drew attention to the need to find and use coal and peat in order to replace firewood with them.

Pallas's most important work on ethnography is his “Collection of Historical Information about the Mongol Tribes.” Cuvier recognizes this collection as such a classic description of peoples, which had not yet been available in any language. In addition to accurate anthropological information, as well as rich information about the customs and rituals of the Mongolian tribes, this book contains a particularly interesting description of the eviction of the Kalmyk tribe, consisting of 60,000 families, from the Astrakhan province. This eviction, reminiscent of the exit of the Israelis from Egypt, took place in 1771, so to speak, before the eyes of Pallas himself. What Pallas did for linguistics by developing and publishing “comparative dictionaries of all languages ​​and dialects” conceived by Empress Catherine II was said above.

Being, in fact, a physician by his university education, Pallas, until his very old age, retained an interest in medical sciences, especially in anatomy and in the compilation of anatomical preparations, about which he published several articles. He also reported interesting information about the diseases of some Siberian peoples, about the poisons they used, and so on. From this brief overview of the unusually diverse and at the same time fruitful scientific activity of Pallas, one can draw a conclusion about the great significance that this activity had not only for science itself, for which he showed new paths and in which he can safely be placed next to Linnaeus and Buffon, but also for the application of this science to practical life. For over forty years, Pallas's activities were almost exclusively devoted to the study of Russia, which became for him a dear second fatherland. It can be said without exaggeration that until now (with the possible exception of Academician Baer) there has not been and is not another scientist to whom Russia would be so indebted for the study of its natural resources and the life of the peoples inhabiting it, as Peter Simon Pallas.

By decree above sources.

F. Köppen.

Russian biographical dictionary. St. Petersburg, 1904, t. 18, p. 153-162

PALLAS Peter Simon(Pallas Peter Simon) (September 22, 1741, Berlin - September 8, 1811, Berlin), one of the largest naturalists of the 18th century. The discoveries and empirical observations he made greatly contributed to the development of zoology, botany, geology, mineralogy, paleontology, geography, history, ethnography, and linguistics.

The name Pallas is on a par with the names of such figures of Russian culture of the 18th century as M.V. Lomonosov and L. Euler. Born into a doctor's family. He received his education at the universities of Halle, Göttingen and Leiden. Member of the Royal Society of London. Came to Russia from Germany at the invitation of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1767. From the same year, academician and professor of natural history.

From the middle of the 18th century. there was an urgent need to begin detailed and in-depth studies of Russia's natural resources for its further development. In 1768, the Academy of Sciences formed 5 expeditions (detachments) for a comprehensive study of the Volga Caucasus, Urals and Siberia. Based on the location of the bases, 3 of them are called Orenburg, 2 - Astrakhan. Young scientists were appointed as leaders of the Orenburg detachments: P., I.I. Lepekhin, I.P. Falk. Pallas's detachment was considered the main one in the expedition, and he himself, in essence, was its general leader.

The routes of all detachments of the Orenburg expedition covered the Volga region from Simbirsk to Tsaritsyn or Guryev, “the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea and the steppes on both sides of the Yaik”, the Ural Mountains and the Iset province, the Irtysh and Tobol rivers, as well as the entire country between Ufa and Chusovaya and mountains between Yekaterinburg and Solikamsk.

Pallas's exploration of the territory of the South Ural region was of enormous importance. The richest collections were collected - mineralogical, botanical, zoological, paleontological; meteorological, climatic and ethnographic observations were carried out. The relief and numerous mineral deposits were described, the directions of rivers and mountain ranges were mapped, the locations of settlements were clarified, mounds and caves, numerous lakes and rivers were explored. The discovery of many new species of the animal and plant kingdom was of great value. The description of the Iset province was organically included in Pallas’s 3-volume work “Travel to Various Places of the Russian State” (1786), which for many decades remained a reference book for several generations of scientists.

In the spring of 1771, Pallas's expedition moved through Omsk along the Irtysh to the Ust-Kamenogorsk fortress. In June 1771, Pallas arrived in Semipalatinsk, and then followed the right bank of the Irtysh towards northwestern Altai. He was interested in the ribbon forest running from the Irtysh through the Kulundinskaya steppe to Barnaul. He also visited the Ube River, the left tributary of the Irtysh. In Altai, Pallas explored ancient ore (“Chudsky”) mines, became familiar with the Kolyvan plant, and the quality of Altai ores. In Barnaul he examined a silver smelter, visited the Suzunsky Mint, etc. Pallas stayed in Siberia until 1774.

The results of research during Pallas’s travels were collections of minerals and plants, which became the main ones in the collection of the Kunstkamera of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, multi-volume diary entries, and unique artifacts. From 1784 to 1788, Pallas’s multi-volume work “Flora of Russia” was published - a reference book describing several thousand plants, including several hundred previously unknown. In 1777, Pallas was appointed a member of the topographical department of the Academy of Sciences; in 1782, an advisor to the board; in 1787, a historiographer of the Admiralty Board. In 1793-94, Pallas visited the Volga region, the North Caucasus, and lived in the Crimea. In 1810 he returned to his homeland.

Op. .: Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reichs. St. Petersburg: Imp. Akad Wiss. 1771. Th. 1; 1773. Th. 2; 1776. Th. 3; ...Travel to different provinces of the Russian Empire at the behest of the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences / Trans. with him. F. Tomansky (parts 1, 2), V. Zuev (part 3). SPb.: At Imp. acad. Sci. 1773. Part 1; 1786. Part 2, book. 1; 1786. Part 2, book. 2; 1788. XVI. Part 3, half 1; 1788. Part 3, half 2.

Lit.: Marakuev V.N. Peter Simon Pallas, his life, scientific works and travels. M., 1877; Okrokvertskhova I.A. Pallas's travels across Russia. Saratov, 1962; Zinner E.P. Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811) // Zinner E.P. A journey of three centuries. Irkutsk, 1973; Muravyov V.B. Roads of Russian provinces: Travel P.S. Pallas. M., 1977; Sokolov V.E., Parnes Y.A. Peter Simon Pallas - founder of Russian zoology: (To the 175th anniversary of the publishing house “Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica”) // Issue. history of natural science and technology. 1987. No. 2; Study of the Urals P.S. Pallas // Arkhipova N.P., Yastrebov E.V. How the Ural Mountains were discovered. Sverdlovsk, 1990; Sokolov V.E., Parkis Y.A. At the origins of Russian terminology. M., 1993; Sytin A.K. Peter Simon Pallas - botanist. M., 1997.

S.A. Beloborodov

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 the Pallas 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 this 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, as is usually the case 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 two sides by the Sok River, which flows in a bend there, and on the western side by the overflowing 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 sooner 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 great hills there are many marmot holes, in which the marmots themselves sat and whistled with their piercing whistle, 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 masters 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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