130 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [DeC. 19, 



coast of Siberia, and which argument Sir Charles Lyell was, I believe, 

 the first to invalidate, has for some years lost all its weight, and the 

 phsenomena are now known to be explicable without any such 

 reference to a diluvial or other cataclysm, it may not be without 

 its use in diffusing true ideas of the conditions of the former exist- 

 ence of Elephants and Rhinoceroses in northern latitudes, to bring 

 that argument face to face with the facts above stated relative to the 

 Bubalus moschatus. 



Supposing that the Musk-buffalo, like the Mammoth and Ticho- 

 rhine Rhinoceros, had been known only as a fossil, the deductions 

 from the habits and habitat of the nearest allied buffaloes, as to its 

 unfitness for an Arctic clime, would have been as reasonable or 

 plausible as was Cuvier's in regard to the Siberian elephant. The 

 entire division of the bovine race, subgenerically separated as Buffaloes 

 {Bubalus) from the Bisons (Bison) and Oxen (Bos), inhabit, it 

 would have been urged, the warmer or tropical latitudes. The 

 species which, in the form, proportions, and direction of its horns, 

 makes the nearest approach to the Siberian fossil Buffalo is the 

 Bubalus caffer of South Africa. What speculations might not have 

 been indulged in as to the changes that had taken place, in the 

 climate of the Ob, the Lena, and the Indigirska, since the period 

 when the Buffaloes, whose fossil remains Pallas discovered in these 

 inclement parts of Siberia, lived and ranged along the banks of 

 those rivers I What temptations to elude the difficulties of explain- 

 ing such changes of temperature, by invoking, with Cuvier, the vast 

 and sudden diluvial wave that might have borne along the carcases 

 of Buffaloes as well as Elephants and Rhinoceroses, from fertile 

 regions to the land of lasting frost ! 



In the Musk-buffalo encountered by our enterprising and much- 

 enduring Arctic explorers in Melville Island and Baring's Island, 

 we have the living exemplification of the slight and superficial modi- 

 fications which enable one species to find its appropriate theatre of 

 existence in a far different latitude from the rest of its congeners. 

 Ought we to have been much more surprised if some individuals — some 

 lingering remnants of the species — of the two-homed woolly Rhino- 

 ceros, or even of the equally warmly-clad Mammoth, had been met 

 with in the same rarely visited regions of Arctic America, deriving 

 their subsistence from the thick forests near the Mackenzie, or 

 resorting to the scattered clumps of spruce-fir that skirt the barren 

 grounds between the 60th and 66th parallels of north latitude ? 



The conclusion from present evidence seems to be that the cir- 

 cumstances which have brought about the extinction, probably 

 gradual, of the northern Rhinoceros and Elephant have not yet 

 effected that of the contemporary species of Arctic Buffalo. 



