Habitation and Destruction of the Mammoths. 345 



are worked, without being naturally led to the idea which we 

 suggest, that larger and deeper lakes were formerly in exist- 

 ence, — lakes, in fact, which in still more primeval times fed 

 the great rivers that washed the Permian detritus to the sea 

 then existing upon the west. Granting these premises, all 

 the relations of the Uralian mammoth alluvia may, it appears 

 to us, be rationally explained ; for in some of the most vio- 

 lent movements of elevation which gave rise to the present 

 central watershed, we may readily conceive how, their bar- 

 riers being broken down, these lacustrine waters were poured 

 off, and how their sliingly bottoms and shores, already con- 

 taining bones of mammoths, were desiccated and raised up 

 into the irregular mounds which now constitute the aurifer- 

 ous alluvia. The very nature of the auriferous shingle, with 

 its subangular fragments, so completely resembles the detri- 

 tus of lakes, and it is so unlike the gravel formed on the 

 shore of seas, that independent of the entire absence of any 

 marine remains whatever of tertiary or recent age^ all along 

 the immediate eastern flank of the Ural mountains, we have 

 no hesitation in believing, that the gold detritus was accu- 

 mulated during a terrestrial and lacustrine condition of the 

 surface. One fact only which we have mentioned seems, at 

 first sight, to militate against this view, viz., the deeply 

 eroded surfaces of some the palaeozoic rocks. But, however 

 these appearances may have been produced, it is manifest 

 they could not have resulted from the denuding action of the 

 same water in which the shingly and slightly rounded angu- 

 lar detritus was formed. Such abraded surfaces may, to a 

 great extent, have been produced, at periods long anterior 

 to that of which we are now treating, and when the edges of 

 the palaeozoic strata, first emerging from beneath the sea, left 

 their irregular and water- worn surfaces to be filled with ter- 

 restrial and lacustrine deposits of after days. 



In some cases, however, the denuding and abrading power 

 of waters, produced both by the bursting of lakes and the 

 change in the direction of the currents, must have been very 

 considerable, for such alone would account for several of the 

 appearances we have spoken of, and the transport of large 



vol.. XL. NO. LXXX. — APRIL 1846. 7i 



