H. M. Hotoorth — Sudden Extinction of the Mammoth. 313 



during the winter." He then goes on to say, " But there is no 

 difficulty in supposing a vegetation capable of nourishing these great 

 quadrupeds to have once flourished between the latitudes of 60'^ and 

 Q5° N." He then postulates the actual existence of such a zone in 

 Siberia, and goes on to argue that the carcases of Mammoths found 

 along the borders of the Polar Sea reached there either by being 

 floated down the rivers or were summer migrants caught by the ice. 

 This view is assui-edly obsolete.^ As I have said before, among the 

 continental authorities there is now but one view held, namely, that 

 there were neither seasonal migrations nor were the bodies thus 

 transported, but that the fauna whose remains are found in such 

 profusion along the Arctic Sea lived where their remains are found, 

 and lived there all the year round. 



If Lyell's explanations are not accepted, we are driven apparently 

 by a process of exhaustion, not only to the conclusion that when the 

 Mammoth lived in Siberia his surroundings were entirely different 

 from those which now prevail there, but also that the change to the 

 present state of things must have taken place suddenly and per 

 saltern. While it is on the one hand clear that the ground in which 

 the bodies are found has been hard frozen since the carcases were 

 entombed, it is no less inevitable that when these same carcases 

 were originally entombed, the ground must have been soft and 

 unfrozen. You cannot thrust soft flesh into hard frozen earth 

 without destroying it. Great carcases of Mammoths with the most 

 delicate tissues, the eyes, the trunk, the feet, beautifully perfect, 

 cannot have been forced down into ground consisting of alternate 

 layers of ice and frozen earth. Such a process is physically impos- 

 sible. 



It has been jauntily argued that the Mammoths were engulphed 

 in the great Siberian rivers and then frozen fast in the ice accumu- 

 lated along their course ; but in the first place, as has been 

 frequently sliown, the carcases do not occur in ice at all, but in 

 frozen earth, and secondly, thej^ do not chiefly occur along the 

 river-courses, nor do they occur chiefly in the marshy, boggy 

 land where others have postulated the suffocation of the animals, 

 but, as Lyell himself says, they are chiefly found " where the 

 banks of the rivers present lofty precipices of sand and clay, from 

 which circumstance Pallas very justly observed, that if sections 

 could be obtained, similar bones might be found in all the elevated 

 lands intervening between the great rivers. Strahlenberg, indeed, 

 had stated before the time of Pallas, that whenever any of the 

 great rivers overflowed and cut out fresh channels during floods, 

 more fossil remains of the same kind were invariably' disclosed." 

 —Lyell's Principles, etc., ed. 1872, vol. i. pp. 179-180. Even if 

 they did chiefly occur in the river-beds and marshes, the necessity 

 for an immediate congelation of previously soft ground still remains. 



Looked at in every view, the judicial conclusion of Cuvier, which 



has been laid aside for many years on account of Sir Charles Lyell's 



supposed reply, is unassailable ; and the longer one studies the 



question, the more one is impressed with the truth of the judgment. 



1 "We think not quite obsolete. — Edit. Geol. Mag. 



