Sir H. H. Howorth—True Horizon of the Mammoth. 3565 
government of Smolensko by Professor Dokutschayef, and which he 
says lay in a similar deposit. Its discoverer attributed it, apparently 
on a priori grounds, to a post-Glacial age, but this view is contested 
and disposed of by Tscherski, who is supported by Nikitin (see the 
discussion in the Memoirs of the St. Petersburg Academy, vol. 40, 
p. 474). This shows how the case for the post-Glacial existence of 
the Mammoth is everywhere crumbling away. I must, in conclusion, 
refer shortly to Mr. Stirrup’s quotations from Favre in regard to the 
cage of the Mammoth in Savoy, etc. He seems to me to have entirely 
misapprehended the views of that geologist. There is not, so far as 
I know, any question among French geologists in regard to the 
meaning of the term ‘“ Alluvion Ancienne,” which was first used, I 
believe, by Necker, in 1841, when he separated the so-called diluvial 
beds near Geneva into two horizons, the lower one of which he called 
Alluvion Ancienne, and the upper one ‘“‘terrain diluvian cateclys- 
tique.” Since his time the meaning of the term “Alluvion Ancienne”’ 
has remained fixed and always connotes a pre-Glacial and not a post- 
_ Glacial deposit, and Favre retained this connotation when in 1862 
he altered Necker’s ‘‘diluvium cataclystique” into ‘terrain glaciére.” 
Favre, like all other French geologists, treats this Alluvion Ancienne 
as pre-Glacial. 
What there is a difficulty about is, not as to the horizon of the 
Alluvion Ancienne, but as to the age of the so-called “ Alluvion de 
terraces,” which Favre separated from the other two diluvial de- 
posits, and which he no doubt says does overlie his “terrain 
glaciére.” Now the age of these terrace-gravels, like the age of the 
brick-earths of the Thames Valley, has been disputed. I believe 
there is no evidence of superposition, and the question has been 
decided on a priori grounds, which, I venture to think, are worth- 
less in such a discussion. ‘The contents and the character of these 
terraces seem to me distinctly to point to their being of the same 
age as the Alluvion Ancienne of the valleys, and to be, therefore, pre- 
Glacial, in the sense in which that word is generally used, and not 
Post-Glacial. Favre mentions three instances, and three only, as 
far as I know of the occurrence in these terrace-gravels of remains 
of Pleistocene mammals; in two instances remains of the Mammoth 
and in the other of the Reindeer. May I add that in regard to 
the most famous Pleistocene deposits of Savoy, namely, the lignites 
of Sonnaz, they distinctly underlie glacial deposits, while Favre 
himself says that no glacial deposit has been found below the lignites 
of Savoy, or that of the Bois de Batie. These lignites, so far as the 
most recent evidence goes, are on the same horizon as those at Durn- 
then, about which, as I showed, Heer changed his views. I cannot 
see, therefore, how in any single instance Mr. Stirrup can sustain 
his case, and, so far as 1 know (in the Old World at all events), 
there is no evidence whatever which is not tainted with doubt and 
difficulty to support the post-Glacial date of the Mammoth and his 
companions, while there is overwhelming evidence that their remains 
occur under the so-called Glacial beds. 
