15 



■south; they are found in Kami schatka where there are no rivers 

 from southern parts down which they could have floated ; they are 

 also found on summits where no rivers could ever come, and they 

 have been found standing upright, a^ if they had sunk down in a 

 marsh, and been frozen in that position. No ; the floating theory 

 •will not do. 



Ill, They must have lived in the locality where we find them. 

 •<* We can hardly doubt," says James Geikie, " that the animals 

 actually occupied the low lying tracts through which the rivers of 

 northern Asia flow." The difficulty arising from the cold climate 

 no longer meets us, now that we know the Mammoth to have been 

 thickly covered with hair. But there is at first sight a difficulty 

 with regard to food. Herds of Elephants and Rhinoceroses could 

 not hve in Siberia noic. Fortunately in certain specimens of Mam- 

 moth and the woolly Rhinoceros the remains of the last meal have 

 been found in the interstices of the teeth, in the stomach, or between 

 the ribs where the stomach used to be. These remains have been 

 carefully examined, and were found to consist of fragments of con- 

 iferous wood, leaves, and plants, some of which still grow in the 

 more southern parts of Siberia* Similar debris is largely found 

 in some spots in the same beds as the Mammoth skeletons, and 

 with it helices and other land shells now found farther south. 

 Such deposits " consist generally of clay alternating with layers of 

 vegetable matter, like the similar layers on the banks of the tundra 

 lakes, of water mosses, grass, roots, leaves, pieces of branches, and 

 layers of low weeds. * * Where the lakes on the tundra have 

 grown small and shallow, we find on and near their banks a layer 

 of turf, under which in many places are remains of trees in good 

 • condition. ^ * I found in a place where larches now only grow 

 in sheltered valleys prostrate larch trees still bearing cones." In 

 : some parts the old dead trunks are so abundant that no other fuel 

 is used. " Hills of drift wood, 250— 300ft. high lie on declivities 

 facing south in New Siberia." Food then was plentiful ; it is not 

 now. Hence there has been some change in the climate. 



IV. The Destruction must have been sudden. Such carcases 

 : as have been found in ice must have been frozen up directly after 

 death, and must have remained so ever since. " "Whatever," says 

 Dr. Buckland, " may have been the climate of the coast of Siberia 

 in antecedent times, not only was it intensely cold within a few 

 days after the mammoth perished, but it has continued cold from 

 that time to the present hour." The same opinion is expressed by 

 Sir C. Lyell. And the frozen ground in which we find the body 

 must have been soft at the time of burial, and have frozen 

 immediately after. And as "we cannot postulate a separate 



♦ Note also the contents of the stomach in the speciaien examined by the EusBian 

 -«Qgineer Benkendorf. 



