332 APPENDIX. 



causes that may have collected them in such abundance on 

 the spots where they are now found, I shall extract a further 

 and more detailed account of the place and circumstances in 

 which they were discovered, from the journal of Mr. Collie 

 (surgeon to the English Expedition), by whom the bones 

 were principally collected, and the chief observations and ex- 

 periments made, on which Captain Beechey has founded his 

 opinion, in which his officers, Lieutenant Belcher and Mr. 

 Collie, entirely coincide with him, that the cliffs containing 

 bones, which have been described by Kotzebue and Esch- 

 scholtz as icebergs covered with moss and grass, are not com- 

 posed of pure ice, but are merely one of the ordinary deposits 

 of mud and gravel, that occur on many parts of the shores 

 of the Polar Sea, being identical in age and character with 

 diluvial deposits of the same kind which are known to be 

 dispersed over the whole of Europe, and over a large part of 

 Northern Asia and North America ; and presenting no other 

 peculiarities in the frozen regions of the North, than that 

 which results from the present temperature of these regions, 

 causing the water which percolates this mud and gravel to be 

 conQ;ealed into ice. 



The question of fact, whether the cliffs containing these 

 bones of elephants, and other land quadrupeds, are composed 

 of " masses of the purest ice, a hundred feet high, and covered 

 on their surface with vegetation," as stated in the voyage of 

 Lieutenant Kotzebue, (p. 219, English translation), or are 

 simply composed, as Captain Beechey thinks them to be, 

 of ordinary diluvium, having its interstices filled up with 

 frozen water, is important, as it affects materially the con- 

 sideration of the further question, as to what was the state of 

 the climate of the arctic regions at the time when they were 

 thickly inhabited by genera of the largest quadrupeds, such 

 as at present exist only in our warmest latitudes ; this being 

 a point of much interest and curiosity, in relation to the his- 

 tory of the physical revolutions that have affected our planet, 

 and on which there still exists a difference of opinion among 

 those individuals who have paid the greatest attention to the 

 subject. 



