Sir S. Roicorth — The Mammoth Age and the Glaciers. 1C3 



In regard to Siberia, Mr. James Geikie, the great champion of 

 extreme glacial views, fully admits that there are no traces of glacial 

 action there, and that the beds in which the Mammoth remains 

 occur are the latest, and thus correspond to the Drift beds ; and 

 he, in fact, actually argues that " the Mammoth and the Woolly 

 Ehinoceros may have survived in Northern Asia down to a com- 

 paratively recent date " (The Great Ice-Age, pp. 654-556, and 

 notes). I cannot see how the conclusion can be avoided, in fact, 

 that in Siberia the Mammoth age was strictly contemporary with, 

 the development of Great Glaciers in Europe and North-East 

 America. Nor do I know anyone who w^ould contest it. 



What is true of Siberia is equally true of that outlier of Siberia — 

 Alaska — which resembles it in every way, in the absence of traces of 

 old glaciation in the preservation of great masses of remains of 

 Pleistocene beasts in a very fresh condition, whose very freshness, 

 as in Siberia, points to their having lived in the very latest 

 geological period, and contemporaneously with the glaciation of the 

 country round Hudson's Bay further east. 



So much for Siberia and Alaska; but it is not possible to separate 

 Siberia from European Eussia. The continuity of conditions of the 

 fauna and of the surface-beds is complete, as I have shown elsewhere. 

 North-Eastern Europe is, from the point of view of physical 

 geography, a mere western continuation of Siberia, and, as we travel 

 southwards and westwards from Petschora land, we pass through 

 a country whose surface-deposits are continuous, and of the same 

 texture and having the same contents, the only difference being that 

 the permanently frozen soil with its preserved animal mummies gives 

 place to soil not permanently frozen, containing only skeletons ; and 

 this goes on in Eussia right up to the deposit where the so-called 

 Northern Drift begins to appear. In Siberia, where no Northern 

 Drift occurs, the continuity of conditions goes on uninterruptedly 

 until we reach the hilly districts of the South, where the 

 Pleistocene remains are less frequent, but precisely the same in 

 character, and they only disappear when we reach the widely- 

 scattered sandy deposits containing salt-water shells, which are the 

 evident bed of the dessicated Central Asiatic Sea of Pleistocene times. 



The view here urged is, I believe, the view of Professor Nikitiu 

 and the most experienced Eussian geologists. 



In regard to Germany and Central Europe, Penck has devoted 

 a special Memoir, entitled " Der Mench und Eiszeit," to show 

 that Paleolithic Man and his companions were occupying that area 

 while the so-called Ice-age was culminating in more Northern 

 latitudes. In the Map in which he gives the various localities 

 where traces of Palaeolithic Man have occui-red in Central Germany, 

 he does not give one where the actual Drift occurs. It would be, 

 indeed, singular if such a trace had, in fact, been found in that area, 

 when we remember the rarity of the occurrence of the Pleistocene 

 beasts in the same district ; but he gives several in the zone bordering 

 the actual Drift-zone on the south, and occupied by Loess, which 

 is very generally accepted now as a flood-deposit closely united with 



