The salt deposits of Stassfurt

Abstract

I. The physical map of Germany shows the country to be roughly divisible into two areas, one of which is mountainous, and the other comparatively flat. The southern or mountainous region contains several ranges, which have, as a rule, a north-westerly and south-easterly trend. Among these are the Thuringer Wald, Fichtelgebirge, Kyffhauser, and the Harz, which latter is the highest and most northerly member of the group, reaching in the Brocken an altitude of 3746 feet. The Erzgebirge, Mittelgebirge, and Riesengebirge form a separate and nearly continuous chain in the south-eastern part of Germany, and, unlike the other ranges, trend in an east-north-east and west-south-west direction. A vast flat or slightly undulating expanse, with few hills to relieve its monotonous horizontality, sweeps away northwards from the base of the Harz Mountains to the sea at Hamburg, and eastwards to the Baltic and the Russian frontier. It has been named the North German Plain or Norddeutsche Ebene, as our kinsmen of Deutschland would prefer to designate it, and is for the most part covered by deep drift, which overlies immense tracts of soft secondary and tertiary strata. The palaeozoic mass of the Harz rises through the secondary rocks in the form of a ridge about fifty miles in length, and fifteen or twenty miles in breadth, on either side of which are great flat troughs, filled with the newer formations. The northern area has been named from two of its principal towns, the ‶Magdeburg-Halberstadt Basin,″ while the southern, which extends between