440 E. E. Eoicorth— Elevation of the Urals. 



to their having been recently but also violently and more or less 

 suddenly elevated. 



This is what Murchison, who made a very elaborate examination 

 of the whole chain from north to south, has to say on this point : 

 " It must be recollected that as by other proofs we have already 

 endeavoured to show the comparatively recent elevation of the Ural 

 crest, this region cannot be looked upon as having been rendered 

 highly mountainous until the very period when great numbers of 

 these animals (i.e. Mammoths) were destroyed — a destruction which 

 we believe to have been mainly accomplished when the present 

 watersheds between Europe and. Asia were determined " (Kussia 

 and the Ural Mountains, p. 492). Again, he says, "A former ter- 

 restrial surface on which the great quadrupeds lived for ages, and 

 the rupture and desiccation of adjacent lakes, coincident with some 

 of the last elevations of the chain, will, we are convinced, best 

 explain the condition in which the remains of the Mammoths are 

 left buried on the edges of the upturned ridges of the Ural, as well as 

 in the lowlands and great estuaries furthest removed from them 

 (id. p. 494). Again, "Such might have been the position and con- 

 dition of some of these creatures when, as we have imagined, the 

 highest ridges of the Ural were thrown up, followed by the rupture 

 of many lakes and the consequent inundation of large tracts of 

 the flat country, previously frequented by these great herbivorous 

 animals" (id. p. 498). Again, "It has further been proved, that the 

 production of gold veins, and the elevations of the Ural, which have 

 given to these mountains their present height and relief, are pheno- 

 mena of a comparatively recent date — phenomena which, in lowering 

 the temperature of the great region so affected, were, we have little 

 doubt, the chief causes of the final destruction of the Mammoths, 

 which, with all their adaptation to existence in northern latitudes, 

 could scarcely be supposed to have been capable of long enduring 

 the want of sustenance incident to Siberian winters of the present 

 period" (id. p. 605). 



I have now brought together such facts as are accessible, illus- 

 trating the recent history of the Ural chain, and they seem to me to 

 converge with overwhelming force upon the conclusion that this range 

 of mountains was upheaved more or less rapidly at the end of the 

 Mammoth period. It was this upheaval which, in my view, caused 

 the plain of Siberia to reverse its slope, and its rivers to reverse 

 their drainage, and I agree very much with Murchison's conclusion 

 that it was the floods of water caused by this upheaval which 

 drowned the Mammoths in a considerable area of European and 

 Asiatic Russia, and covered their remains with wide-spreading con- 

 tinuous sheets of gravel and other soft debris. I differ from him in 

 deriving this water from a number of lakes, and would urge, as 

 I urged many years ago, that it was rather the outpouring of the 

 great Asiatic Mediterranean sea, whose relics are so ubiquitous in 

 salt lakes and stretches of marine sand which largely caused the 

 great debacle, and that the upheaval of the Urals was in this way 

 very largely the causa causans of the extinction of the Mammoth over 

 a wide area. 



