IX.] MAMMOTH FINDS. 309 



Next after Trofimov's mammoth come the manimoih-Jinds of 

 Middendorff and Schmidt. The former was made in 1843 on the 

 bank of the river Tajmur, under 75^ N.L. ; the latter in 1866 

 or the Gyda tundra, west of the mouth of the Yenisej in 70° 13' 

 N.L. The soft parts of these ^/inds were not so well preserved 

 as those just mentioned. But the Jinds at all events had a 

 greater importance for science, from the localities having been 

 thoroughly examined by competent scientific men. Middendorff 

 arrived at the result that the animal found by him had floated 

 from more southerly regions to the place where it was found. 

 Schmidt on the other hand found that the stratum which con- 

 tained the mammoth rested on a bed of marine clay, containing 

 shells of high northern species of Crustacea which still live in the 

 Polar Sea, and that it was covered with strata of sand alternat- 

 ing with beds, from a quarter to half a foot thick, of decayed 

 remains of plants, which completely correspond with the turf 

 beds which are still formed in the lakes of the tundra. Even 

 the very beds of earth and clay in which the bones, pieces of 

 hide, and hair of the mammoth mummy were enclosed, con- 

 tained pieces of larch, branches and leaves of the dwarf birch 

 (Betula nana), and of two northern species of willow {Salix 

 glauca and herhacea).^ It appears from this that the climate of 

 Siberia at the time when these mammoth-carcages were im- 

 bedded, was very nearly the same as the present, and as the 

 stream in whose neighbourhood the find was made is a com- 

 paratively inconsiderable tundra river, lying wholly to the north 

 of the limit of trees, there is no probability that the carcase 

 drifted with the spring ice from the wooded region of Siberia 

 towards the north. Schmidt, therefore, supposes that the 

 Siberian elephant, if it did not always live in the northern- 

 most parts of Asia, occasionally wandered thither, in the same 

 way that the reindeer now betakes itself to the coast of the 

 Polar Sea. VoN Brandt, Von Schmalhausen, and others, had 

 besides already shown that the remains of food which were found 

 in the hollow^s of the teeth of the Wilui rhinoceros consisted of 

 portions of leaves and needles of species of trees which still 

 grow in Siberia.^ 



Soon after the mammoth found on the Gyda tundra had been 

 examined by Schmidt, similar finds were examined by Ger- 

 hard VON Maydell, at three different places between the rivers 

 Kolyma and Indigirka, about a hundred kilometres from the 

 Polar Sea. With respect to these fiends I can only refer to a 



^ Friedrich Sclimidt, WissenschaftUche Kesultate der zur Anfsuchung ernes 

 Mammuthcadavers auxf/esandten Expedition {Mem. de V Acad, de ISt. Peter.s- 

 bourg, Sen VII. T. XV'lII. No. 1, 1872). 



* ijrandt, Berichte der preiissischen Akad. der Wissenchaften, 1846, p. 224. 

 Vou Schmalliausen, Bidl. de VAcad. de St. Petersbourg, T. XXII. p. 291. 



