Ice-beds on Eschscholtz Bay 89 



extirpation of the elephant and the 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 extir- 

 pate 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 contended, 

 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 pottery ; or, at all events, some bones 

 of man himself would, ere this, have been discovered amongst the 

 numberless remains of the lost species which he had extirpated. It 

 follows, therefore^ 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 be- 

 fore the time in which the [p. 611] 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 revolu- 

 tion 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 hypoth- 

 esis utterly untenable. 



" The state of the argument then respecting the former climate 

 of the polar regions is nearly as follows : It is probable that in 

 remote periods, when the earliest strata were deposited, the tem- 

 perature of a great part of the northern hemisphere equalled or ex- 

 ceeded 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 regu- 

 lar and successive variations in the character of extinct plants and 

 animals which we find buried one above another in the successive 

 strata that compose the crust of the globe. These have in modern 

 times been investigated with sufficient care and knowledge of the 

 subject to render it almost certain that successive changes, from 

 extreme to moderate heat, have taken place in those parts of the 

 northern hemisphere which constitute central and southern Europe : 



