H. H. Howorth—The Mammoth in Siberia. 557 
seasons. In Norway the heavy rains occur in spring or autumn, at 
which seasons what is rain below is dry snow up in the Fjeldes. 
Our highest hills do not afford in summer this kind of refuge from 
rain and damp to an animal whose coat keeps off any degree of cold, 
but will not stand continued moisture” (Laing’s Residence in Norway, 
264). It is the damp of our latitude now-a-days that the reindeer 
cannot endure. It is strange that no use has been made of this fact 
hitherto in zoological reasoning, for it is a very potent reason why 
so many foreign animals die here in our menageries. The beasts do 
not suffer from cold and other assigned causes as from damp. Diseases 
of the lungs are the scourges of such establishments, and these in- 
duced not by cold but damp. The camel, the tiger, etc., can endure 
the exceedingly bitter cold of the Tibetan plateau with impunity, 
because the cold is a dry parching cold. The lion which lived in 
historical times in the rugged mountains of Thrace need not fear 
the cold of our winters, but may well dread our damp seasons, which 
make such havoc even among our acclimatized people. That our 
Climate has grown damper is probable from the contemporaneous 
extinction of the spruce fir with the reindeer, the former of which, 
as well as the other linear-leaved trees, according to Ermann, espe- 
cially likes a dry air. I have no doubt, therefore, that the reindeer 
is quite capable of thriving and thriving well in temperate climates 
when other suitable conditions are at hand, and that it is a mistake 
to postulate an arctic climate wherever we meet with its remains. 
Let us revert once more to the Mammoth. Iam not aware that 
the contents of the stomach of any Siberian Mammoth have been 
hitherto examined, and we are reduced as to actual evidence of food 
to the results obtained from an examination of the fissures of the 
teeth of the Rhinoceros. This has been made by several observers. 
Brandt found bits of coniferous wood and remains of a seed. C. A. 
Meyer found the seed of an Ephedra. Mercklin distinguished the 
wood of a willow. The most elaborate examination of such frail 
debris was made in 1876, by M. Von J. Schmalhausen (Bull. St. 
Pet. Acad. vol. xxii. p. 291) ; he found in some brown matter scraped 
from a Rhinoceros teeth from Irkutsk remains of monocotyledons and 
dicotyledons, and recognized traces of a graminaceous plant, and of an 
ericaceous one, the latter probably Vaccinium Vitis Idea. Among 
the remains of coniferee were those of a Picea (? obovata), of an 
Abies (? sibiriea) of a Larix (? sibirica), of a Betula, of a Salix, and 
of an Ephedra, all plants still thriving in Southern Siberia. The 
a priori evidence therefore is overwhelming, that when the Mam- 
moths and their associated animals lived in Siberia, the climate was 
much more temperate. Let us now adduce such experimental 
evidence as we possess. We cannot of course take our thermometer 
with us to those days, but we can do something very like it, we 
can examine the debris of vegetation that has survived from those 
times. Plants at all events cannot migrate; they must stay the 
winter through, and they afford us therefore a good thermometer to 
mark where ancient isothermal lines passed. Fortunately remains 
of such plants have survived. These consist of two series, those 
