The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

THE DNIEPER. 273bluish fur from those of the plains. The leeches were formerly exported in largenumbers, but they were nearly exterminated during the severe winter of 1840.The Pinsk Marsh will soon be a thing of the past. The surveys of 1873showed that the Minsk country sloped towards the Dnieper sufficiently to allowof a regular outflow by removing dams and weirs, and cutting a few drains inthe direction of the incline. Since then most of the works have been completedat the relatively moderate cost of £80,000, with which 480 miles of drains havebeen cut, converting 3"-?0,000 acres of swamp into meadows, and carrying off thesuperfluous waters from 490,000 acres of forest. The produce of the district maynow also be forwarded by navigable canals either to the Vistula or the Niemenbasin. These changes have already much reduced Lake Knaz, or Jid, and haveotherwise transformed the whole aspect of the land.The Dnieper,or Dxepr.Yet, of all the great Dnieper tributaries, the Pripet alone still remains withouta well-defined course. The Dnieper itself rises much nearer to the Gulf ofFinland than to the Euxine, in the low-lying region whence also flow some headstreamsof the Dvina, Volga, and Oka, and where the water-partings of the fourbasins are scarcely distinguishable.At first confined between the basins drainingto the Baltic and Caspian, it receives few tributaries above Smolensk andMoghilov ; but below Bogachov it is joined from the west by the Berezina, andby the Soj from the east, after which it is nearly doubled in size by the Pripet,draining most of Minsk, half of Yolhynia, and even a portion of Grodno. Thenfollow the Teterev and the Desna, completing the upper course of the mosthistorical river in Russia, the famous Borysthenes of the Greeks.In some parts of its upper course the left banks of the Dnieper are higherthan the right, but lower down its right banks have a mean elevation of from300 to 430 feet. The east side is here composed almost entirely of low-lyingalluvial tracts, where the only eminences are former islands slowly raised by theaccumulated humus. North-east of Kiev, the Desna flows in a valley which wasprobably an old bed of the Dnieper, and the now forsaken banks of which mayeasily be traced. Flowing now 9 miles farther west, the main stream passesalong the base of undermined cliffs, whence large blocks get yearly detachedduring the floods, or under the action of the floating masses of ice when thethaw sets in. The elevation of the right bank has determined the foundationof most of the towns, and the direction of the main highways along the western sideof the lower basin. The roads on the left bonk are impassable quagmires for thegreater part of the year, and the same contrast is presented by the tributaries ofthe Dnieper, where most of the towns and villages are also on the right bank.The breaking up of the ice is seldom attended with danger. Thanks to thesoutherly course of the river, the ice melts first in the lower reaches, or is carriedto the estuary before that of the upper course begins to come down. Thus atKherson the Dnieper is ice-bound, on an average, for 80 to 85 days only ; atVekatericoslavfor 89; and at Kiev, still higher up, for 96 days.