336 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1919, 
violent blow like that produced by a fall from a high place, could 
be observed under conditions which appear to be beyond criticism. 
Brandt thought he could prove from the condition, and notably 
from the color of the contents of the blood vessels in the head of 
a Le’hinoceros tichorhinus found under conditions identical with those 
under which the remains of mammoths are found, that this animal 
died of asphyxiation. This specimen has been made to serve as an 
argument for death by asphyxiation from immersion in the case of 
the mammoths recently discovered and to serve as proof of diluvial 
cataclysms. Fatal accidents from immersion in water or from 
miring may have been frequent without, however, its being neces- 
sary to regard them as connected with cataclysms. Let it again be 
noticed, moreover, that here once more it is illusory appearances 
which have furnished material for explanations. Formerly capital 
importance was attributed to the color of the blood in diagnosing 
death by asphyxia; certain old masters of legal medicine were 
imbued with this idea, which Brandt applied to his rhinoceros. 
But it is now proved as concerns man that “if at the moment of 
death there may exist some difference in the color (of the blood), 
according to the particular kind of death, this difference vanishes 
in the time intervening between death and the autopsy. Neither 
have local congestions any diagnostic value. I will mention further 
that the condition of the blood, such as Gautrelet and I have de- 
scribed it in a mammoth, only allows very limited investigations. 
The carcasses of mammoths are far from being found in perfect 
preservation; generally nothing more than shreds are dug out, in 
which the skin, flesh, and cartilages are sometimes apparently in a 
fresh condition; as for the rest, it is destroyed or profoundly altered. 
Gléboff (1846) thought he had found blood corpuscles and nervous 
elements, but these corpuscles were only grains of dust, and these 
nerve fibers were only bits of mycelium of saprophytic fungi. 
All the ordinary causes of death from cold must have acted on 
the mammoth. The snow, the icy rains; could have penetrated the 
curious fur with which the animal was covered; the fur must then 
have transformed itself into a veritable cloak of ice, not merely in 
a superficial manner, but down to direct contact with the epidermis. 
This was deprived for its part of the very efficacious protection 
which in other mammals is furnished by the continual discharge of 
sebum and sweat. 
Finally it does not seem to me that the essential character of the 
mammoth’s skin—that. is, the absence of cutaneous glands—-can be 
regarded as having been progressively developed in this species, 
whose first representatives would have been, on this hypothesis, bet- 
ter protected than the last. We see the same character existing in the 
144 Thoinot, Précis de médecine légale, Paris, 1913, yol. 1, pp. 615-616. 
