90 Smithsonian Exploration in Alaska in 1904 



and although we are not yet enough acquainted with the details of 

 the geology of the arctic regions to apply this argument to them 

 with the same precision and to the same extent as to lower lati- 

 tudes, still we have detached examples of organic remains in high 

 latitudes sufficient to show the former existence of heat in the 

 regions where they are found — a few detached spots within the 

 Arctic Circle that can be shown to have been once the site of ex- 

 tensive coral reefs are as decisive in proof that the climate in these 

 spots was warm at the time when these corals lived and grew into 

 a reef, as, on the other hand, the carcass of a single elephant pre- 

 served in ice is decisive of the existence of continual and intense 

 cold ever since the period at which it perished. We have for some 

 time known that in and near Melville Island, and it has been ascer- 

 tained by Captain Beechey's expedition, that at Cape Thompson, 

 near Beering's Strait, there occur within the Arctic Circle extensive 

 rocks of limestone containing many of the same fossil shells and 

 fossil corals that abound in the carboniferous limestone of Derby- 

 shire: the remains of fossil marine turtles also (chelonia radiata) 

 have been ascertained by Professor Fischer to exist in Siberia. 

 These are enough to show that the climate could not have been 

 cold at the time and place when they were deposited ; and the anal- 

 ogy of adjacent European latitudes renders it probable that the 

 same cooling processes that were going on in them extended their 

 influence to the polar regions also, producing successive reductions 

 of temperature, accompanied by corresponding changes in the ani- 

 mal [p. 612] and vegetable creation, until the period arrived in 

 which the elephant and rhinoceros inhabited nearly the entire sur- 

 face of what are now the temperate and frigid zones of the north- 

 ern hemisphere. 



" Assuming then on such evidence as I have alluded to, the 

 former high temperature of the Arctic Circle, and knowing from 

 the investment in ice and preservation of the carcass of the mam- 

 moth, that this region was intensely cold at the time immediately 

 succeeding its death, and has so continued to the present hour ; the 

 point on which we are most in want of decisive evidence is the tem- 

 perature of the climate in which the mammoth lived. It is a viola- 

 tion of existing analogies to suppose that any extinct elephant or 

 rhinoceros was more tolerant of cold than extinct corallines or 

 turtles ; and as this northern region of the earth seems to have 

 undergone successive changes from heat to cold, so it is probable 

 that the last of these changes was coincident with the extirpation 

 of the mammoth. That this last change was sudden is shown by 



