406 H. H. Hou-orth — Cause of the Extinction of the Mammoth. 



It is no part of the present paper to refer to the elaborate criticism 

 by which Schrenck fixes the specific character of the animal, nor 

 yet to discuss his somewhat fantastic iiotion that it and its com- 

 panions came by their end by being sufi"ocated in snow-drifts, a view 

 which cannot be reconciled with the many facts mentioned in these 

 papers. One passage in the memoir is, however, of singular interest 

 to us, and may be quoted in conjunction with that already cited 

 from Brandt. Speaking of the nostrils, Schrenck says : '' Die 

 Nasenlocher an demselben sind. weit geoffuet und ueber dem 

 nnbescbadigten rechten zieht sich eine wohl damit zusammenhang- 

 ende Keibe horizontaler Falten bin. Auch der Mund steht zumTheil 

 offen. Man mocbte daraus schliessen, dass das Thier durch Erstick- 

 iing verendete und zuvor noch durch Aufreissen der Nasenlocher dem 

 Tode zu entgehen suchte " (op. cit. pp. 48-49). 



Tbis sentence confirms the statement of Brandt, and we may take 

 it that the Ehinoceros in each case was sufibcated or drowned. The 

 postulate about the snow-drift may be set aside as quite untenable. 

 It necessitates not only that the snow-drift should have existed at 

 the time when the Ehinoceros lived in Siberia, but have remained 

 intact with its contents ever since ; but, as we know from many 

 other cases, these carcases are not found in frozen snow or ice above 

 the level of the ground, but in frozen earth, and buried several 

 feet below it. Postulating then that the great Mammals were 

 destroyed in some violent way implying suffocation or drowning, 

 let us proceed. 



A theory of their destruction, which has been urged by some 

 writers, has many adherents. It is that the animals sank in boggy 

 ground, and were thus overwhelmed ; but this also, as in the case 

 of the theory about the river mud, is incompatible with the evidence. 

 They are not generally found in boggy ground, nor in ground that 

 could ever have been boggy, but in layers of clay and sand raised 

 in conspicuous hillocks above the surrounding tundras. As is our 

 wont, we have tried to exhaust the various possibilities of the 

 situation, and it seems to us there is only one alternative left. If 

 the animals died suddenly by drowning, and there was a sudden 

 change of climate immediately afterwards, it seems to follow that 

 they came by their end by some catastrophe by which they were 

 swept away together with the sand and clay in which they are now 

 enveloped, and that this catastrophe, as the older writers urged, was 

 in the nature of a wide-spread flood of water, which covered the 

 carcases immediately with a thick layer of deposit, and buried 

 them out of the reach of the weather and other vicissitudes. This 

 accounts, as no other theory does, for the remains occurring so 

 abundantly in the high ground forming the water-shed between the 

 various rivers that flow northwards. It accounts also for their 

 sometimes being found intact, and sometimes disintegrated. It 

 accounts again, as no other theory does, for the discovery of con- 

 siderable quantities of drifted branches of trees in close neighbour- 

 hood with the examples of the Mammoth found by Middendorf on 

 the Taimyr — that discovered in digging the canal at Bromberg, 



