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 



