110 M. Stirrup—True Horizon of the Mammoth. 
A Russian scientific expedition, under the auspices of the Academy 
of Sciences of St. Petersburg, has recently returned from the 
exploration of the New Siberian Islands and the mainland opposite, 
the Yana district, between the rivers Lena and Indigirka. 
The scientific results of the expedition are in the course of being 
classified and published in the Memoirs of the Academy. Two of 
these Memoirs have already appeared, and a third has just been 
finished, bearing the title “The Bed of Fossil Ice in its Relation to 
the Deposits of Mammoth Carcases,” by Baron de Toll. 
I have not yet seen this last Memoir, but am indebted for my 
knowledge of its contents to the remarks and analysis of M. Schmidt 
when calling attention to the work at the meeting of the Academy 
on the 27th January, 1892. 
It has been long known that in North Siberia, as well as in certain 
regions of North America, ice is met with in the ground under the 
form of a rock. To this ice several names have been given by 
different authors, and Baron de Toll proposes a new name, that 
of ice-rock (Steineis) or fossil ice. Of this he distinguishes three 
types: (1) that filling fissures in the ground; (2) the beds of ice 
in the valleys; (3) that of the continuous horizontal beds, very 
frequent in the New Siberian Islands, and upon the mainland 
opposite. 
Upon this ice is superposed the recent argillaceous beds containing 
the bones of quaternary animals, and even their entire carcases. 
Baron de Toll explains in the following way the finding of Mam- 
moth bones and carcases in or upon this paleocrystic ice, in which, 
he says, they were never originally enclosed. In Spring, the waters 
scour in part these upper beds of clay, and the bones as well as the 
carcases fall to the bottom; it is thus that they are then found, quite 
at the bottom of the series of these beds. 
The remains of a Mammoth found by M. de Toll in the Valley 
of Bar-Ourikh, to east of the town of Oust-Yansk, were found in the 
argillaceous beds which covered some thick beds of the valley ice. 
In the large island of Linkhof, one of the New Siberian group, 
he was shown the place where the carcase of a Mammoth had 
been found in a great cleft which had affected the upper stratum 
of clay as well as the upper layer of ice; the carcase had fallen to 
the bottom and was thus preserved in the ice. Analyzing in detail 
all the information relating to the famous Mammoth carcase brought 
by Mr. Adams (1806) to St. Petersburg from the mouth of the 
Lena, Baron de Toll arrives at the conclusion that this carcase had 
likewise fallen from above to the bottom of a crack in the ice, and 
was consequently found “in the middle of blocks of ice,” according 
to Mr. Adams’ expression. 
This explanation gains support from the explorations of Dr. Dall, 
in Alaska (quoted by Prof. Wright, “Ice Age in North America,” 
pp. 838-35), where the conditions are much the same as in Siberia, 
and where large numbers of the bones of the Mammoth also occur, 
and which are often found at the foot of the ice-cliffs in Eschscholtz 
Bay. Dr. Dall, after speaking of the vegetation of the tundra and 
