10 NOTE ON ELEPHAS MERIDIONALS. 



for goods to the value of 30 roubles. Adams did not see the 

 remains until 1806. In the meantime the natives had carried off a 

 great part of the flesh to feed their dogs ; wild beasts too, had fed 

 upon it, and little more than the skeleton was left ; one of the fore- 

 legs had been taken away, the skin of the side on which the body 

 rested was covered with hair, and so heavy it took ten men to drag 

 it on to the banks of the river, which consisted of a continuous 

 and undisturbed bed of gravel intercalated with clay without 

 boulders, supported by a bed consisting of coarse sand containing 

 boulders of various kinds and sizes. I will only name one 

 more instance mentioned by Xordenskiold, who collected frag- 

 ments of bones and pieces of the hide of a Mammoth at the 

 confluence of the river Mesenken with the Yenesei 71-28" north 

 in 1876. The hide was an inch thick and nearly tanned by age. 

 It was clear in Xordenskiold's opirion it had been washed out of 

 the tundra-banks ; close by it was a very fine cranium of the 

 Musk-ox. In 1887 he found on the banks of a tributary of 

 the Lena 69 north an exceedingly well preserved carcase of a 

 Rhinoceros (R. Merkii Jaers). The nearer, he adds, we come to 

 the coast of the Polar Sea the more common are the remains of 

 the Mammoth, and nowhere are they found in such numbers as 

 on the Xew Siberian Islands. Hedenstrom, in the space of one 

 verst, saw ten tusks sticking out of the ground. Other animal 

 forms occur on these half explored islands, which must have lived 

 on the plains of Siberia with the Mammoth. As no flesh 

 could remain without decomposition in an unfrozen bed, it is 

 obvious that xmdecomposed and entire animals found in the 

 Siberian tundras must have been frozen immediately after death, 

 and remained so until extricated from their ice tomb, localise 

 exposure to the air through the melting of the ice would have caused 

 decomposition to set in. This was Sir Charles Lyell's view 

 " It is certain," he says, " that from the moment when the carcases 

 both of the Mammoth and Rhinoceros were buried in Siberia in 

 latitude 64 and 70 north the soil must have remained frozen and 

 the atmosphere as cold as at this day. It is clear that the ice or 



