15 
south; they are found in Kamischatka where there are no rivers 
from southern parts down whiclr they could have floated; they are 
also found on summits where no rivers could ever come, and they 
have been found standing upright, a: if they had sunk down in a 
marsh, and been frozen in that position. No; the floating theory 
will not do. 
III, They must have lived in the locality where we find them. 
“We can hardly doubt,” says James Geikie, “that the animals 
-actually occupied the low lying tracts through which the rivers of 
northern Asia flow.’’ The difficulty arising from the cold climate 
“no longer meets us, now that we know the Mammoth to have been 
thickly covered with hair. But there is at first sight a difficulty 
with regard to food. Herds of Elephants and Rhinoceroses could 
not live in Siberia now. Fortunately in certain specimens of Mam- 
‘moth and the woolly Rhinoceros the remains of the last meal have 
‘been found in the interstices of the teeth, in the stomach, or between 
the ribs where the stomach used to be. These remains have been 
-earefully examined, and were found to consist of fragments of con- 
iferous wood, leaves, and plants, some of which still grow in the 
more southern parts of Siberia Similar debris is largely found 
in some spots in the same beds as the Mammoth skeletons, and 
with it helices and other land shells now found farther south. 
Such deposits “consist generally of clay alternating with layers of 
vegetable matter, like the similar layers on the banks of the tundra 
kes, of water mosses, grass, roots, leaves, pieces of branches, and 
layers of low weeds. * * Where the lakes on the tundra have 
-grown small and shallow, we find on and near their banks a layer 
of turf, under which in many places are remains of trees in good 
‘condition. * * J found in a place where larches now only grow 
in sheltered valleys prostrate larch trees still bearing cones.” In 
:some parts the old dead trunks are so abundant that no other fuel 
isused. ‘Hills of drift wood, 250—300ft. high lie on declivities 
facing south in New Siberia.” Food then was plentiful ; it is not 
now. Hence there has been some change in the climate. 
_ IV. The Destruction must have been sudden. Such carcases 
‘a8 have been found in ice must have been frozen up directly after 
‘death, and must have remained so ever since. “ Whatever,” says 
Dr. Buckland, “may have been the climate of: the coast of Siberia 
in antecedent times, not only was it intensely cold within a few 
-days after the mammoth perished, but it has continued cold from 
that time to the present hour.” The same opinion is expressed by 
Sir C. Lyell. And the frozen ground in which we find the body 
must have been soft at the time of burial, and have frozen 
immediately after. And as “we cannot postulate a separate 
* Note also the contents of the stomach in the specimen examined by the Russian 
engineer Benkendorf. , ‘4 . 
