io6 Smithsonian Exploration in Alaska in 1904 



the ice before the clay, etc., had been deposited. These were 

 usually filled with a finer-grained deposit of clay with less vege- 

 table matter, and the layers were waved, as if the deposit had been 

 afifected by current action while going on. 



" In these places was noticed, especially, the most unexpected 

 fact connected with the whole formation, namely, a strong peculiar 

 smell, as of rotting animal matter, burnt leather, and stable manure 

 combined. This odor was not confined to the spots above men- 

 tioned, and was not quite the same at all places, but had the same 

 general character wherever it was noticed. A large part of the 

 clay had no particular smell. At the places where the odor was 

 strongest, it was observed to emanate particularly from darker, pasty 

 spots in the clay (though permeating elsewhere), leading to the 

 supposition that these might be remains of the soft parts of the 

 mammoth and other animals, whose bones are daily washed out by 

 the sea from the clay talus. 



" At or near these spots, where the odor was strongest, a rusty, 

 red lichen, or lichen-like fungus, grew on the wet clay of the talus 

 in extensive patches. Some of these, of the bad smelling deposit, 

 and as many bones of the mammoth, fossil buffalo, etc., as we could 

 carry were secured. These included a mammoth tusk, with both 

 ends gone, but still five and a half feet long and six inches in 

 diameter, which I shall forward to the office. Dwarf birches, alders, 

 seven or eight feet high, with stems three inches in diameter, and a 

 luxuriant growth of herbage, including numerous very toothsome 

 berries, grew with the roots less than a foot from perpetual solid ice. 



" The formation of the surrounding country shows no high land 

 or rocky hills, from which a glacier might have been derived and 

 then covered with debris from their sides. The continuity of the 

 mossy surface showed that the ice must be quite destitute of mo- 

 tion, and the circumstances appeared to point to one conclusion, 

 that there is here a ridge of solid ice, rising several hundred feet 

 above the sea, and higher than any of the land about it, and older 

 than the mammoth and fossil horse ; this ice taking upon itself the 

 functions of a regular stratified rock. The formation, though 

 visited before, has not hitherto been intelligibly described from a 

 geological standpoint. Though many facts may remain to be in- 

 vestigated, and whatever be the conclusions as to its origin and 

 mode of preservation, it certainly remains one of the most wonder- 

 ful and puzzling geological phenomena in existence. 



" On the 3d of September we sailed from Chamisso Harbor for 

 Berine Strait. * * -^ " 



