106 EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN. [CHAP. v. 



The mammoth 1 (Fig. 22) is very abundant in the 

 caverns and river deposits of Britain and of France, and 

 is known to have ranged over the Pyrenees into Spain, 

 from the discovery of specimens in the zinc-mines of 

 Santander. It has been proved by Prof. E. Lartet and 

 Dr. Falconer to have lived in the neighbourhood of Eome 

 at a time when the volcanoes of central Italy were active, 

 and poured currents of lava and threw clouds of ashes 

 over the site of the imperial city. It is common in 

 northern and southern Germany, but it has not been found 

 in Europe north of a line passing through Hamburg, 

 or in any part of Scandinavia or Finland. It occurs in 

 the auriferous gravels of the Urals ; and in Siberia, as is 

 well known, it formerly existed in countless herds, being 

 buried in the morasses in large numbers, in the same 

 manner as the Irish elks at the bottom of the Irish peat- 

 bogs. The admirable preservation- of some of the carcases 

 is undoubtedly due to their having been entombed 

 directly after death, and then quickly frozen up, a pro- 

 cess which need not necessarily imply climatal conditions 

 unlike those of the present time in Siberia. In unusually 

 hot spring times, the warm waters borne -down by the 

 great rivers from their southern feeders thaw the frozen 

 morasses with incredible rapidity, so that the hard ice- 

 bound " tundra " becomes quickly converted into a 

 treacherous bog. In the exceptionally warm season of 

 1846, the mammoth discovered by Lieut. Benkendorf on 

 the banks of the Indigirka was thawed out of the tundra 

 until it was revealed to the astonished eyes of the 

 beholder, standing on its feet in the position in which it 

 had been bogged. Had any elks or reindeer been on 



1 See Dawkins, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. Lond., xxxv. 138, for the 

 references to the range of the mammoth. 



