550 H. H. Howorth—The Mammoth in Siberia. 
VIL—Tur Mammots in Siperta.} 
By Henry H. Howorru, F.S8.A. 
E have surveyed the distribution of Mammoths’ remains in 
Siberia, especially of those in which the soft parts have been 
preserved, and have found them distributed along its whole length 
from the Kara Sea to the peninsula of the Chukchi. We have seen 
that these remains are found in large numbers, and that the further 
north we travel, the more abundant do they become. That while in 
Central Siberia they are comparatively unfrequent, as we near the 
Arctic border-land, the river banks and tundras teem more and more 
with them, until in the Bear Islands and the islands of New Siberia 
the ground is largely composed of the bones of Mammoths and the 
associated animals. These very abnormal facts, which are now 
familiar enough, have naturally attracted a great amount of specula- 
tion, and the question has arisen on many sides, How came they 
here? As we have seen, the unsophisticated natives explain the 
presence among them of carcases of huge animals with their flesh 
intact, by the elementary theory that the animals are still alive and 
live underground, dying only when exposed to the sun light. 
Bayer, the famous Russian Academician, who wrote in the pre- 
critical days of Geology, urged that these remains were the debris of 
a vast campaign; that they were the remains of elephants which 
Chinghiz Khan had taken with him in one of his conquering marches, 
and which had perished on the way, quite oblivious of Chinghiz 
Khan’s actual movements, and of his unacquaintance with elephants. 
The notion may be paired off with the similar suggestions explaining 
the presence of huge bones in Italy and Britain as the remnants of 
the respective campaigns of Pyrrhus and of Claudius. Isbrand Ides 
and other early travellers were at least more plausible when they 
invoked the Noachian deluge to account for what to them was un- 
doubtedly a most extraordinary fact. These immature theories we 
only mention as historical curiosities, and pass on to more generally 
adopted ones. These may be limited to two hypotheses. First, 
that these animals lived much further south, and were carried down 
by the rivers to the sites where they are now found. Secondly, that 
they lived and died where their remains are now found. The former 
theory was once a favourite one. It seemed incredible that animals, 
whose nearest relatives now live only in tropical countries, should 
have existed under such very different conditions as must have pre- 
vailed in Siberia, and it was natural that speculation should have 
gone in the direction that these animals lived much further south 
than where their remains are now found, and should have been 
floated down the rivers of Siberia to the borders of the Polar Sea. 
When, however, carcases of the animals were discovered covered with 
woolly hair, evidently adapting them for a much colder climate than 
those of Africa or India, where their relatives have more or less bare 
skins ; when, again, Brandt and others showed from an examination © 
of the cavities in the teeth of the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, as I shall 
point out presently, that these pachyderms did not feed on tropical 
1 See former Articles in Gzon. Mac. 1880, pp. 408 and 491. 
