Correspondence—Mr. Mark Stirrup. 309d 
my innocence, I thought that burden lay heavily on Sir Henry’s 
shoulders. 
Now to the argument,—first comes the evidence of the Lignite 
beds at Diirnten and Utznach, in which Sir Henry says he cannot 
quite follow me when I referred to the difficulties of proving the 
age of the beds by their contained animal remains, consisting of an 
association and mixture of pre-Glacial and post-Glacial forms 
of extinct and living species, which can scarcely have been con- 
tem poraneous. 
Doubtless, the stratigraphical position and assumed age of these 
Zurich beds was determined by their fossil contents, but the 
evidence does not appear to me conclusive on this point, and 
certainly Sir Chas. Lyell speaks much more guardedly than Sir 
Henry, and Heer himself does not claim a pre-Glacial antiquity for 
the Mammoth. Professor Heer, summarising the evidence on this 
question, says (vide Heer’s Primeval World of Switzerland, Vol. II, 
p- 217, English Edition), “ From the facts hitherto ascertained we 
learn that the Mammoth appeared in Switzerland at the end of the 
second glacial epoch” (the italics are mine). 
Moreover, in the Professor’s Chronological Table of the Quater- 
nary Period (op. cit. p. 203) the true horizon of the Mammoth is 
evidently undetermined by him, as a point of interrogation is 
affixed to its first appearance. 
Turning now to Sir H. Howorth’s strictures on the Russian 
evidence which I adduced as opposed to his reasoning, and the 
relevancy of which he says he cannot understand, possibly so, 
seeing that he is apparently referring to a quite different expedition 
to the one I cited. The Bear Islands expedition, of which he speaks 
with that fulness of knowledge so characteristic of him, I never 
mentioned, as I had no facts before me with regard to it bearing 
on the question at issue. 
If Sir Henry will refer to my paper he will see that it was an 
expedition to the New Siberian or Liakov Islands of which I was 
speaking, and which are separated from the Bear Islands by three or 
four degrees of longitude. 
The results of that expedition, so far as regards the Mammoth 
problem, is only known to the general public through M. Schmidt’s 
brief analysis of Baron Toll’s book to which I referred, and which 
has apparently been ignored by Sir Henry Howorth. Is it too 
much to ask of Sir Henry to read what he is supposed to be replying 
to, before indulging in somewhat acrid criticism ? 
I have a letter from M. Schmidt, who is a member of the 
Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg and a foreign correspondent 
of the London Geological Society, dated in the early part of 
February last, in which he says Baron Toll’s book is not yet fully 
printed, and that the Baron has left St. Petersburg on another 
Mammoth quest and will probably be absent about a year. 
It is from special explorations such as those of Baron Toll in the 
so-called “Home of the Mammoth” that its true horizon, so far at 
least as its Asiatic home, is to be predicated. 
