THE 



GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE, 



NEW SERIES. DECADE III. VOL. VIII. 



No. III.— MARCH, 1891. 



OI^IC3-II^^.A.IJ J^I^TIOIJES. 



I. — On the very Eecent and Rapid Elevation of the 

 Highlands of Eastern Asia. 



By Henry H. Hoavoeth, Esq., M.P., etc., etc. 



AMONG the many interesting issues raised by the discovery of 

 Mammoth remains in large numbers along the Arctic borders 

 of Eastern Asia, one has, I think, ceased to be polemical. So far as 

 I know, there is no serious student who now contests the fact that 

 the Mammoth and his companions lived where their remains are 

 found. The rooted trees upon which they fed, and the southern 

 river-shells which were their contemporaries, both of which are 

 found with their remains (both being incapable of migration), prove 

 incontestably what a score of other arguments show, that the fauna 

 of North-Eastern Siberia in the Mammoth age, like its flora, must be 

 explained by some other theory than migration. This I have urged 

 in many ways in my work on the Mammoth. 



If the arguments I have recently adduced in the Geological 

 Magazine to show that the two great rivers of Western Siberia 

 flowed southwards and not northwards in the Mammoth age be 

 sound, they give the finishing blow to what has virtually ceased 

 for many other reasons to be a tenable theory, namely, that the 

 Mammoth carcases and the vast debris of the animal world found 

 on the mainland and on the islands off the coast of Siberia are the 

 results of river portage. Against this last theory I have also tried 

 to converge a large number of arguments, old and new, in the work 

 just cited. 



There remains only one possible conclusion, as I said at starting, 

 namely, that the great beasts whose remains abound so much in the 

 tundras east and west of the Lower Lena on the Bear Islands, etc., 

 lived where their remains occur, as the Eussian explorers and as our 

 most experienced writers agree. 



This conclusion necessitates our postulating that the area in ques- 

 tion in the time when the Mammoth lived, instead of being as now 

 a bare tundra covered with snow for the greater part of the year, 

 and swept by icy winds, with a short summer of little more than, 

 six weeks, was sufficiently temperate in climate to permit an abun- 

 dant and accessible vegetation to exist all the year round, not only up to 

 the present border of the Arctic Sea, but right across from Siberia 



DECADE III. — VOL. VIII. NO. III. 7 



