210 EXTINCT MONSTERS. 
exceptional on account of its unusually warm summer, so that the 
ground of the tundra region thawed, and was converted into a 
morass. Had any Mammoths been alive then, and strayed beyond | 
the limits of the woods into the tundra, probably some of them 
would have been likewise engulphed, and, when once covered up 
and protected from the decaying action of the air, the cold of the 
next winter would have frozen their carcases as this one must 
have been frozen up. 
Truly, ‘‘ there is nothing new under the sun,” and the present 
highly useful method of freezing meat and bringing it over from 
America or New Zealand to add to our insufficient home supplies, 
is but a resort to a process employed by Nature long before the 
age of steamships, and perhaps even before the appearance of 
man on the earth! 
Secondly, with regard to the food of the Mammoth, Benkendorf’s 
discovery is of great service in solving the question how such 
a creature could have maintained its existence in so inhospitable 
and unpromising a country. The presence of fir-spikes in the 
stomach is sufficient to prove that it fed on vegetation such as is 
now found at the northern part of the woods as they join the low 
treeless tundra in which the body lay buried. 
Before this discovery the food of the Mammoth was unknown, 
and all sorts of theories were devised in order to account for its 
remains being found so far north. Some thought that the 
Mammoth lived in temperate regions, and that the carcases were 
swept down by great floods into higher and colder latitudes. 
But it would be impossible for the bodies to be hurried along a 
devious course for so many miles without a good deal of injury, 
and probably they would fall to pieces on the way. But, as 
Professor Owen has so convincingly argued, there is no reason 
why herds of Mammoths should not have obtained a sufficient 
supply of food in a country like the southern part of Siberia, 
where trees abound in spite of the fact that during a great part 
of the year it is covered with snow. And this is his line of 
