Kennj H. Howorth — Elevation of Eastern Ada. 99 



This I have urged before in these pages. We must not, however, 

 exaggerate this cause, and attribute it to more than it can explain. 



When we inquire why the climate of the valley of the Lower 

 Lena, and notably Yakutsk, should be so exceptionally severe, as 

 compared with almost every other place on the same parallel of 

 latitude, we shall find that it is due not so much to the prevalence 

 of excessively cold north winds, but to the prevalence of excessively 

 cold south winds : especiallj' is this the case in summer, when in 

 many other areas on the same parallel the south wind brings a balmy 

 memory of the tropics with it. Here it always comes from the 

 sterile cold plateau of Tibet. It then flows across the Mongolian 

 highlands, and, after blowing over such a wide space of very elevated 

 land, it is not only drained of its moisture, but is also cooled down to 

 a low temperature. Hence at Yakutsk the south wind is often 

 nearly, if not quite, as terrible a visitor as the north wind. 



If therefore we are to trace the present severitj^ of the climate of 

 North-Eastern Asia to its most potent and efficient cause, we must 

 trace it to the existence of vast masses of mountain land and high 

 plateaux culminating in the Thian Shan, the Kuen Lun, and the 

 Himalayas and including the Altai range and the great upland steppes 

 of the Pamir of Tibet and of Mongolia proper. 



So long as this vast refrigerator exists in Asia, so long does it seem 

 to me must the climate of North-Eastern Siberia remain a very cold 

 and severe climate, and one incompatible with vast herds of herbi- 

 vorous animals finding suitable food in the latitude of the Bear 

 Islands ; and if we are to find the efficient and real cause of a once 

 temperate climate, where everything is now so palpably the reverse, 

 we must inevitably postulate the non-existence in the Mammoth age 

 of these great masses of high land. I have no hesitation in doing 

 so. The suggestion was made long ago as a suggestion merely, by a 

 much greater man than myself, whose sobriety of argument and ripe 

 judgment have been somewhat overshadowed lately by more imagina- 

 tive forms of scientific reasoning. I mean Alexander von Humboldt. 

 Humboldt argued that the rise of the Ural and Altai Mountains, and 

 with them of enormous masses of the continent of Asia, must have 

 so refrigerated Siberia, that its forests, which in the halcyon days of 

 Mammoths may have extended in certain promontories to near the 

 Icy Sea, had necessarily shrunk back to their present limits, and 

 left these coasts entirely to the Keindeer and its mosses (Russia and 

 the Ural Mountains, vol. ii. p. 497). Let us now see how this view- 

 can be supported inductively. 



The first remarkable fact to which I would call attention is one 

 that arrested notice long ago, namely, that in the Altai Mountains, 

 which are very lofty and otherwise well adapted to nurse large 

 glaciers, no traces of the so-called Glacial Age can be found. No 

 striated rocks, no ancient boulders. This is assuredly a remarkable 

 fact. It is attested by more than one reputable witness. One of the 

 first trained geologists who visited the Altai Mountains was Pierre de 

 TchihatchefF, who published a very fine work on that chain in 1845. 

 He remarked in it on the absence from the Altai as from the Ural 



