Habitation and Destruction of the Mammoths. 353 



flowing courses of the great Siberian rivers, such, we affirm, 

 they must have been from the very earliest periods — from 

 the time, in short, when the palseozoic rocks constituting the 

 Altai and Ural mountains, and their dependencies, were 

 raised into dry lands, never more to be depressed beneath the 

 waters of the ocean. Infinitely the loftiest and the grandest 

 of these chains, the Altai, with its snowy peaks (yet void of 

 glaciers), ranging from west to east, is the great southern 

 watershed from whence the Siberian rivers must, we say, 

 have flowed from south to north during long ages, whilst the 

 peculiarity of all the great counter-forts or advanced ridges 

 of that mighty chain, consists in their being composed of 

 palaeozoic, metamorphic, and igneous rocks, which equally 

 extend from south to north in a number of long, low, meri- 

 dian, parallel ridges. These north and south ridges, of 

 which the Ural is the westernmost, thus encase each river, 

 and, preventing its flexure to the east and west, have neces- 

 sarily determined its course to the glacial ocean, from epochs 

 long anterior to the creation of a mammoth. 



Looking to their low altitude above the sea, their muddy 

 and sandy composition, and also to the discovery by Pallas 

 of marine remains in many of them, we must believe that 

 all the low promontories between the Obe, the Yenisei,* and 

 the Lena, which lie northwards of the ancient ridges and 

 plateaux, were under the waters and estuaries at the periods 

 when the mammoths ranged over the Ural, the Altai, and 

 the adjacent regions of Siberia, then above the sea-t Such 



* We write Yenisei, like all other Russian words, as it is pronounced. 

 The German J, as used by Pallas and the early German explorers of dis- 

 tant parts of Russia, has, unluckily, found its way into all English maps. 

 Pallas states, that the fossil bones which fall from the high cliffs of the 

 Yenisei, opposite Krasnoyarsk, are so numerous, that, on decomposing, 

 they form a substance which he calls " Osteocolle." (Vol. iv., p. 443. 

 Fr. Ed. See also Appendix to iJeechey's Voyage.) 



t The definition of the outlines of the land and sea during the 

 mammoth period, or the extent to which marine estuaries entered into 

 the continent of Siberia, including possibly even a separation of the 

 Ural from the Altai, can alone be determined by the united labours of 

 many observers. If the data of Pallas respecting the grounds on the 

 lower region of the Issetz river, which is covered with black eaxth, may 



