Habitation and Beatr action of the Mammoths. 351 



enamel which essentially distinguishes them from the teeth 

 of the Asiatic or African elephant, and which specially pro- 

 vided the mammoth with the means of subsisting upon the 

 coarser ligneous tissues of trees and shrubs. In short, this 

 great zoological authority, combining the consideration of 

 the peculiar structure of their teeth with the nature of their 

 epidermis and coverings, has come to the conclusion that 

 the mammoth was, by its very organization, a meet compa- 

 nion for the reindeer and other inhabitants of the north.* 



Applying the views of Humboldt, we might well admit, 

 tliat the rise of the Ural and Altai mountains, and, with 

 them, of enormous masses of the continent of Asia, must 

 have so refrigerated Siberia, that its forests, which, in the 

 halcyon days of mammoths, may have extended in certain 

 promontories to near the Icy Sea, had necessarily shrunk 

 back to their present limits, and left these coasts entirely to 

 the reindeer and its mosses. But to require our belief that 

 the mammoth ever lived in the northernmost tracts of Siberia 

 is uncalled for, since geologists well know that the wide and 

 low tracts of northern Siberia, in which its remains are most 

 abundant, were then evidently beneath the sea ; and the bones 

 must have been drifted thither, and possibly for some dis- 

 tance. t Yet if we suppose that these animals lived on certain 

 lands, as in the Ural and the north trending chains, up to 

 60° and 65° N. lat. (which facts and physical conditions war- 

 rant), we are still indebted to Professor Owen for having 

 removed the greatest of all the difficulties which previously 

 environed the problem ; since there is no longer any objection 

 to the mammoth being an inhabitant even of the Arctic circle, 

 provided (and there are still such examples in Europe), fir- 

 trees and shrub-like vegetables could exist in such latitudes. 



From the physical structure of the region, we are, indeed, 

 entitled to suppose, that not only the Ural and Altai moun- 

 tains, but also their advanced northern ridges and plateaux 

 (a half or two-thirds of Siberia), formerly constituted a 



* See Owen's History of British Fossil Mammalia and Birds, 1844, 

 p. 261, et seq, 



t Marine remains were found by Pallas, associated with mammoths' 

 bones, in numerous places, and about 70° N. lat. 



