GEOLOGY. 219 



force of his fall. The two guides, Julien Devassoux and Joseph Marie 

 Coutet, soon appeared. It was long before we could convince ourselves 

 that the others were past hope, and we exhausted ourselves fruitlessly 

 for some time in fathoming the loose snow with our poles. We ven- 

 tured in the crevasse, on the snow which had fallen therein. Happily 

 it did not give way beneath our weight. Here we continued above a 

 quarter of an hour to make every exertion for the recovery of our 

 poor comrades. After thrusting the poles in to their full length, we 

 knelt down and applied our mouths to the end, shouting alon^ them, 

 and then listening for an answer, in the fond hope that they might be 

 still alive, sheltered by some projection of the icy walls of the cre- 

 vasse ; but, alas ! all was silent as the grave." 



This calamity, of course, resulted in the abandonment of Dr. Ham- 

 mers enterprise, and served for a time as a check to other attempts to 

 reach the summit of Mont Blanc. 



DISCOVERY OF GIGANTIC AXI3IALS IN SIBERIAN ICE. 



An effort has recently been set on foot, by the Imperial Academy 

 of St. Petersburg, for promoting the further discovery of the congealed 

 remains of gigantic mammalia in Siberia. Since the discovery, in 

 1771, of the rhinoceros imbedded in ice at Wiljui (lat. 64), of which 

 hardly any portion was preserved ; and that of the mammoth at the 

 mouth of the Lena, in 1806, of which the preservation of such remains 

 as still exist was owing to the purely accidental circumstance of the 

 failure of a Russian embassy to China, one of whose members, happen- 

 ing to be on the spot, succeeded in obtaining and preserving those 

 precious relics, but with little or no information as to the circumstances 

 of the locality, and with the loss of by far the larger portion of the car- 

 cass a third of a century elapsed, when another of these gigantic 

 mummies, thus wonderfully preserved, came to light. Three years, 

 however, were allowed to elapse before any effective steps were taken 

 to obtain possession of what then remained, which by that time was re- 

 duced to an undistinguishable mass. What could be collected was 

 indeed despatched to St. Petersburg, but without so much as any pre- 

 cise information as to the place of the discovery, or any circumstances 

 beyond the fact of the discovery having been made. Since that time, 

 nothing has been done in the way of further research. It cannot, 

 however, be doubted that many other such relics must exist, similarly 

 preserved, and susceptible of detection by active and systematic re- 

 search. During the last two centuries, it is computed that, at the very 

 least, 20,000 mammoths, and probably twice or thrice that number, 

 have been washed out of the ice and soil in which they have been im- 

 bedded by the action of the spring floods, and among them the occur- 

 rence of perfect skeletons is far from infrequent. The tusks only, 

 however, have been made an object of conservation, from their com- 

 mercial value as ivory. 



THE GLACIERS OF THE HEVIALAYAS. 



An interesting communication on the glaciers of the Himalayas has 

 recently been made to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, by Capt. Mont- 

 gomery, chief of the staff of the Trigonometrical Survey of India, now 

 in the course of prosecution by the British Government. 



