306 Memoir upon living and fossil Elephants. 
portant, that the czars furmerly reserved the monopoly of it 
to themselves. 
It was the profit they produced which perhaps excited the 
searching for them, and which occasioned the discovery of 
so many of these bones in that vast country; adding to 
these circumstances, that the immense rivers which run inte 
the Frozen Sea, and which are prodigiously swelled at the 
time of a thaw, and carry away large portions of their 
banks; and thus every year immense quantities of bones are 
discovered, besides those which are found in digging wells, 
&e. 
We ought not to believe that these animals have been 
simply led from India by the rivers of the neighbouring 
mountains, because this would still take place at the present 
day, as lately observed by a respectable author *. 
_M. Pallas informs us that there is not in all Asiatic Rus- 
sia, from the Don or the Tanais to the extremity of the pro- 
niontory of the Tchutchis, any brook or river upon the banks 
or beds of which elephants’ bones, and those of other ani- 
mals foreign to the climate, have not been found. 
But the higher regions, and the primitive and schistous 
chains of mountains, want them, as well as marine petrifi- 
cations, while the lower declivities and the vast sandy plains 
furnish them wherever they are intersected by brooks or 
rivers, which proves that they would be found in abundance 
in the rest of their extent also if dug for. 
There is but very few elephants’ bones in such places as 
are Jow and marshy: thus the river Ob, which flows some- 
times through low and marshy forests, only contains them 
in such places ‘¢ ubi adjacentes colles arenosi preruptam 
_ripam efficiunt.’”’ Strahlenberg made the same observation 
several years ago upon the manuer in which these bones are 
brought to light in consequence of inundations. 
They are found in every latitude, and it is from the north 
that the best ivory comes, because it has been less exposed 
to the action of the elements. 
A circumstance which, independently of this prodigious 
* Patrin Hist. Nat. des Mineraux, tom. v. p. 391, et sequent.: also Nou- 
veau Dict. des Sc. Nat., art. Fossiles. 
abundance, 
