FOSSIL BONES. 209 



dition of the earth when these ancient fossils were living 

 plants. If the great coal measures, containing similar 

 fossil vegetable forms, were deposited at the same epoch 

 in distant localities, there must have existed, when that 

 deposition took place, a similarity of condition of the 

 North American continent from latitude 75° down to 

 40°.* 



In concluding this sketch I shall advert to the dis- 

 tribution of the fossil remains of mammalia, and especially 

 to those of the mammoth. Teeth of this animal have 

 been discovered on the banks of several rivers in Russian 

 America, north of Mount St. Elias ; and there is a cele- 

 brated locality in Kotzebue Sound where the thawing and 

 waste of frozen cliffs is continually exposing the bones and 

 tusks of mammoths and other quadrupeds. Dr. Buckland, 

 in his interesting account of the specimens collected at 

 this place, on Captain Beechey's voyage, enumerates frag- 

 ments of bones of mammoths, and of the urus, the leg-bone 

 of a large deer, and a cervical vertebra of some unknown 

 animal, different from any that now inhabit Arctic Ame- 

 rica. Along with these there were found also the skull of 

 a musk ox and some bones of the reindeer in a more recent 

 condition than the others. In Asia, from the Don to 

 Beering's Straits, on the banks of all the great rivers, 

 bones and teeth are still more plentiful, the local deposits 

 being richer and more extensive the more we advance to 

 the north. They are especially abundant on the islands 

 north of Sviatoi Noss (Sacred Cape), lying between the 

 73d and 76th parallels; and some of these islands seem 

 to consist in a great part of organic remains, which fill 

 more space than the matrix in which they lie. The soil 



* The coal of Vancouver's Island and Oregon belongs, it is said, to 

 the great coal measures. 



VOL. II. P 



