Land Ice of Arctic and Sub-Arctic Regions 51 



Tohnatschozv's Vicn's on the Ice of the Beresowka River 



An abridged translation from the report (in Russian) of O. F. 

 Herz, chief of an expedition sent out by the St. Petersburg Acad- 

 emy of Sciences to investigate the finding and excavating of re- 

 mains of a mammoth, partly in the flesh, in a frozen state, on the 

 banks of the Beresowka River, a tributary of the Kolyma, in north- 

 eastern Siberia, is published in the Smithsonian Report for 1903, 

 pp. 611-625, pis. i-ix. Herz gathered some pieces of ice, along with 

 other specimens from the formations associated with the mammoth. 

 These materials were taken back to St. Petersburg, where he placed 

 them together with his field notes and sketches in the hands of I, 

 P. Tolmatschow to report upon from a geological standpoint.^" 



These accounts of Plerz and Tolmatschow are of particular inter- 

 est because they throw much light on the circumstances surround- 

 ing the occurrence of such remains. Unfortunately the position in 

 which the carcass was found, was secondary to its place of original 

 interment, and leaves doubt about one important point — whether 

 the mammoth died and became entombed before or after the thick 

 bed of ice, forming the terrace feature along the bank of the river 

 at this place, was formed ; or while it was forming. There appears 

 to be no evidence at hand to settle this question and place the time 

 at which this particular animal died and thus give us an authentic 

 record of the occurrence of the mammoth in its true geological 

 (stratigraphical) horizon. 



Tolmatschow says : " The difficult task of the expedition, i. e., 

 the taking of the mammoth carcass to St. Petersburg in the best 

 possible condition, the short time at its disposal, and the cold winter 

 with much snow, did not permit of the pursuit of geological re- 

 searches as completely as would have been desirable. Besides this 

 the chief of the expedition, O. F. Herz, is not a geologist, but an 

 old zoologist, and was not at all prepared to make geological ob- 

 servations because there was a geologist, Herr Sevastianofif, 

 among the members of the expedition. (For some unstated rea- 

 son this member did not accompany Herz to the mammoth re- 

 mains on the Beresowka, but after reaching Mysova, within 

 eighty-five miles of the mammoth, returned to Sredne- 

 Kolymsk.) " 



Tolmatschow devotes most of his article to a discussion of the 

 properties of ice as a mineral, its crystallographic forms and the 



'"' Bodeneis vom Fluss Beresowka. Verhandl. d. K. Min. Geo., 2d Ser., 

 Bd. XL, pp. 415-452, pi. v-vni. 



