354 APPENDIX. 



America. The analogy of the non extirpation of the elephant 

 and rhinoceros on the continent and islands of India, where 

 man has long been at least as far advanced in civilization, and 

 much more populous than he can ever have been in the frozen 

 wilds of Siberia, shows that he does not extirpate the living 

 species of these genera in places where they are his fellow- 

 tenants of the present surface of the earth. The same non- 

 extirpation of the elephant and rhinoceros occurs also in the 

 less civilized regions of Africa ; still further, it may be con- 

 tended, that if man had invaded the territories of the mammoth 

 and its associates, until he became the instrument of their 

 extirpation, we should have found, ere now, some of the usual 

 indications which man, even in his wildest state, must leave 

 behind him ; some few traces of savage utensils, arrows, knives 

 and other instruments of stone and bone, and the rudest pot- 

 tery ; or, at all events, some bones of man himself would, ere 

 this, have been discovered among the numberless remains of 

 the lost species which he had extirpated. It follows, there- 

 fore, from the absence of human bones and of works of art in 

 the same deposits with the remains of mammoths, that man 

 did not exist in these northern regions of the earth at or 

 before the time in which the mammoths were destroyed; and 

 the enormous accumulation of the wreck of mountains that 

 has been mixed up with their remains points to some great 

 aqueous revolution as the cause by which their sudden and 

 total extirpation was effected. It cannot be contended, that 

 like small and feeble species, they may have been destroyed by 

 wild animals more powerful than themselves. The bulk and 

 strength of the mammoth and rhinoceros, the two largest 

 quadrupeds in the creation, render such an hypothesis utterly 

 untenable. 



The state of the argument then respecting the former cli- 

 mate of the polar regions is nearly as follows : — It is probable 

 that in remote periods, when the earliest strata were deposited, 

 the temperature of a great part of the northern hemisphere 

 equalled or exceeded that of our modern tropics, and that it 

 has been reduced to its present state by a series of successive 

 changes. The evidence of this high temperature and of these 

 changes consists in the regular and successive variations in the 



