Ice-beds on Eschscholtz Bay 95 



large carcasses could not, without decomposition, be conveyed from 

 a distance by water, it is fair to conclude that the animals lived in 

 the districts in which they are now found, or in their immediate 

 neighborhood, and not, as some have supposed, in warmer and more 

 distant regions. 



" It seems also to us to be impossible that ice could have been the 

 vehicle by which whole bodies or complete skeletons could have been 

 brought from warmer parallels and deposited in the vast cemeteries 

 of polar Siberia or in Eschscholtz Bay, for the simple reason that 

 ice is not the product of these warmer countries. Nor does the 

 difficulty seem less of explaining how such a group of pachyderms 

 and ruminants could have been brought down by travelling glaciers 

 from warmer southern valleys of mountain ranges no longer in ex- 

 istence, without admitting such extensive changes in the surface 

 level of the district, as would confound all our ideas of the distribu- 

 tion of the drift, as we at present find it. 



" It is easier to imagine that the animals whose osseous remains 

 now engage our attention ranged while living on the shores of an 

 icy sea, and that by some sudden deluge, or vast wave or succes- 

 sion of waves, they were swept from their pasture grounds. It is 

 not necessary that we should here discuss the extent of this deluge, 

 or inquire whether it covered simultaneously the north of Europe, 

 Asia, and America ; or operated by a succession of great waves or 

 more local inundations. What more immediately concerns our sub- 

 ject is, to know that in the drift containing marine shells of existing 

 species, and boulders borne far from their parent cliffs, we have 

 evidence of diluvial action extending from the ultima Thule of the 

 American polar sea to far southwards in the valley of the Mississippi. 



" The identification of the fossil mammoth and rhinoceros of 

 England and Europe with those of Siberia by the first of living 

 comparative anatomists, might lead us to conclude that the same 

 fauna inhabited the northern parts of the new and old world ; but I 

 think that we shall find evidence in the bones of bovine animals 

 brought from Eschscholtz Bay, that an American type of ruminants 

 was perceptible even in that early age. 



" At the present time the moose-deer and mountain sheep inhabit 

 districts of America suited to their habits up to the most northern 

 limits of the continent; while the musk-ox and reindeer go beyond 

 its shores to distant islands ; and the arctic hare is a perennial resi- 

 dent of the most northern of these islands that have been visited, or 

 up to the seventy-sixth parallel. Supposing the climate of North 

 America, at a time just antecedent to the drift period, to have been 



