ITS EARLIEST HEAD-QUARTERS. 245 



§ 7. Earliest Head-quarters op the Mammoth — where ? 



Another question comes up for discussion. On what an- 

 cient land was the first dwelling-place of the Mammoth ? 

 Whence did it radiate through the vast geographical area 

 included within its ascertained range of habitat ? The pre- 

 vailing impression, at the present time, appears to be in 

 favour of the high land of Northern Asia. But I know not 

 upon what good grounds it can be sustained. That the spe- 

 cies existed there in great force, during a long lapse of time, 

 has been clearly established ; and it seems equally clear, that 

 it spread from that area into America, by Behring's Straits or 

 the Aleutian Isles, before the severance of the two continents 

 took place, surviving, in North America, down to a date that 

 would correspond with the superficial lacustrine marls and 

 ancient peat-bogs of Europe. But the cast of the North 

 Asiatic fauna, as shown above, is so entirely modern as to 

 have been regarded by Lartet as being that of the ancestors 

 of our existing European mammalia. The Sub-Uralian depo- 

 sits have, as yet, supplied no consistent evidence of Pliocene 

 strata or Pliocene mammalia, by means of which the Mam- 

 moth-yielding and auriferous gravels may be synchronized 

 with, or differentiated from, the newer Pliocene strata of 

 England, in which the Mammoth occurs along with species 

 of an older age. At present there is a wide gap, in the for- 

 mations other than marine, between the Miocene strata along 

 the shores of the Black Sea, which, at Nicolajew in the Cher- 

 sonese, near Odessa, have yielded the greater portion of the 

 skeleton of a Mastodon Tapir o'ides, 1 and the Ural gravels con- 

 taining bones of E. primigenius and its usual associates. 



But there are strong grounds to suspect that Pliocene de- 

 posits exist on the western flanks of the Ural mountains, the 

 geological history of which still remains to be unfolded. 

 Pallas, in his ' Observatio de dentibus molaribus ignoti ani- 

 malis, &c, ad Uralense jugum repertis,' 2 which Lartet refers 

 to M. Borsoni, 3 distinctly states that the two molars were 

 found in a horizontal stratum of indurated sandy and ochreous 

 iron-ore which is worked on the bank of the Schebysy, an 

 affluent of the Bjelaya, on the western slope of the Urals. 

 The Yergennes and Abbe Chappe molars, figured by^ Buffon 

 in the ' Notes Justificatives.' appended to ' Les Epoques 

 de la Nature,' the former procured from ' Little Tartary,' 

 and the latter reputed to be from Siberia (or the Crimea ?), 



1 Quart. Jcrar. Geol. Soc. Vol. xviii. | 2 ' Acta Pretropolitana,' 3d Ser., 1777, 

 (Translations, &c.) p. 13. [See antea, p. j torn. i. p. 213, tab. ix. fig. 4. 

 65.— Ed.] 3 Bullet. Societ. Geol. de France, 2e 



I Se>. torn. xvi. p. 484. 



