RevieiDS — Hoicorth's Mammoth and the Flood. 475 



in the summer season it may be thawed to a depth of three feet. 

 In several cases Mammoth carcases have been found standing 

 upright in the ground, as if they had sunk down and been frozen in 

 that position ; in other cases remains of various animals are com- 

 mingled in the frozen soil and must have been drifted some distance, 

 before being embedded in the black earth, sand, or icy clay. Theie 

 is evidence also of much drift wood, as well as of large tree-stems, to 

 indicate that the climate formerly was more favourable to vegetation 

 than it now is. The animals represented by the frozen carcases, 

 must have been overwhelmed and have been rapidly enveloped in 

 mud and gravel, and the ground must have become frozen, and 

 remained so until the present day. There appears no escape from 

 this conclusion, though it is difficult to say in what way the animals 

 were overwhelmed and how long they have been embedded. As 

 Mr. Iloworth remarks, no Eussian naturalist holds the view that 

 the Mammoth lived on to Recent times in Siberia. 



The facts pointed out by our author are opposed to the view that 

 the Mammoth and other animals were, as a rule, drifted far from 

 the south, for the remains are found not only on the banks of the 

 long rivers, but also abundantly on the borders of the very short 

 ones, and in nearly all parts of the tundra. Mr. Howorth concludes 

 that the Mammoth and his companions lived for the most part where 

 their remains occur in northern as well as in southern Siberia, but 

 under different climatal conditions. He says (p. 96), ''We cannot 

 postulate a separate climatic cataclysm for each individual case arid 

 each individual locality, but we are forced to the conclusion that the 

 now permanently frozen zone in Asia became frozen at the same 

 time from the same causes." While we feel with the author that 

 diluvial agents may reasonably be inferred in order to account for 

 the remarkable entombment of many organic remains, yet we are 

 not prepai-ed to go so far as he does, and to regard the phenomena 

 generally as " the result of one of Nature's hecatonibs on a grand 

 and wide-spread scale, when a vast fauna perished simultaneously."^ 



The fact is, our author would lead us all round the world, and 

 taking the Pleistocene faima, which we admit in a general way to 

 be contemporaneous, he would have us believe that the bulk of the 

 animal remains were smothered up at one time in " the Great Flood." 

 Not only were the remains of Mammoth and Ehinoceros found in 

 brickearth and gravel and in Cave-earth, over the north of Europe, 

 entombed by this cataclysm ; but the bulk of the Pleistocene remains 

 in North and South America, in Australia, Tasmania, and Nevsr 

 Zealand were covered up at one and the same time ! In other words 

 the Mastodon and Elephant, the Megatherium, the Diprotodon and 

 Nototherium, and the Moa also, perished in one general catastrophe ! 



The author bases his views partly on the general mode of oc- 

 currence of the fossil animal remains, their abundance in certain 

 places, and the commingling of various genera ; but as he observes 

 the present volume only deals with one-half of the problem, namely, 

 that illustrated by palaeontology and archaeology. In interpreting 

 this or any other geological record, the stratigraphical evidence is of 



