Habitation and Destruction of the Mammotha. 349 



that such feline, and other animals, once roamed over th'e 

 British Isles,' as well as other European countries. Why, 

 then, is it improbable, that large elephants, with a peculiarly 

 thick integument, a close coating of wool, and much long 

 shaggy hair, should have also been the occupants of wide 

 tracts of Northern Europe and Asia ^* At one time, it was 

 deemed expedient to imagine a sudden fall of temperature, 

 in order to account for the peculiar conservation of these 

 creatures, by which they were supposed to have been at once 

 frozen up in the mud into which they had been washed, or 

 the morasses into which they had sunk. 



The discovery, indeed, of a Bhinoceros tichorhinushy Pallas, 

 with its skin and flesh adherent, upon the banks of the Vilgni, 

 a tributary of the Lena (a portion of this rhinoceros, with 

 the skin and hair adherent to the sides of the head, are 

 now to be seen in the Museum of Natural History at 

 St Petersburg), and still more, the subsequent acquisition 

 of the entire carcase of a mammoth, on the banks of 

 the Lena, in lat. 70° N., by Mr Adams, the details relating to 

 which have been so fully given by geologists of all countries, 

 naturally, indeed, led to such ideas. Convinced by their per- 

 fect preservation, that these animals must have lived in or 

 near the countries where their bones are found, Cuvier de- 

 clared it to be his opinion, that they must have disappeared 

 by a revolution, which at once destroyed all the individuals, 

 accompanied by a sudden change of climate. 



In England, this view was very ably sustained by Dr Buck- 

 land, and particularly in his memoir on the fossil remains 

 which occur in Eschscholtz Bay, and other places on the east 

 side of Behring's Straits,+ where vast quantities of mam- 



thus proving, that no very great change of climate has taken place since 

 these animals were contemporaneous. (See Proceedings of the Geolo- 

 gical Society, 1834, Silurian System, p. 554, and Phil. Mag., September 

 1829 and January 1830.) 



* This coating, Dr Fleming has well remarked, was probably as im- 

 penetrable to rain and cold as that of the musk ox of the Polar Circle. 

 Edin. New Phil. Journal, No. 12, p. 285. 



t See Beechy's Voyage to the Pacific, vol. ii.. Appendix, p. 593. 

 Besides the abundant remains of mammoths, Dr Buckland describes those 



