CHAP, v.] INCOMING EXTINCT SPECIES. 107 



that spot at that time they might have been entombed 

 in the same way, and preserved by the frosts of the 

 winter till they were liberated again by the rare chance 

 of their place of sepulture being invaded by warm floods 

 from the south. The thaw in that year proceeded so 

 rapidly that Lieut. Benkendorf and his Cossacks narrowly 

 escaped the alternative of being entombed in the soft 

 morass, or of being swept out northwards into the Arctic 

 Sea, as his mammoth was, to join the vast assembly of 

 mammoths and reindeer and other animals which have 

 been swept down in a similar fashion. 



The remains of the animal occur throughout Russian 

 Asia; and the singular notice of fossil ivory being 

 brought for sale to Khiva, by an enterprising Arabian 

 traveller, Abou-el-Cassim, in the middle of the tenth 

 century, applies to the mammoth ivory from the old 

 Bulgaria on the Lower Volga. 



We learn from the recent researches of M. Chabas 

 that an elephant was living in the valley of the Eu- 

 phrates in the sixteenth century B.C., when that district 

 was invaded by the Egyptians, since a great hunting 

 of elephants by the Pharaoh Thothmes III. in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Nineveh has been recorded in an Egyptian 

 inscription. This important notice shows that the 

 fossil and living elephants of Asia in ancient times were 

 not separated from each other by impassable geographical 

 barriers or wide spaces of mountain and desert. Those 

 hunted may have been either the fossil (E. armeniacus) 

 Armenian, or the Indian species. 1 On taking a survey 

 of the whole evidence as to the range of the mammoth 



1 Chabas, fitudes sur I'AntiquitJ historique d'apris les sources fyyptiennes, 

 2d edit, p. 124. It must be remarked that this notice stands alone, and 

 is as yet not confirmed by any Assyrian or Babylonian records. 



