144 W. BOYD DAWKINS ON THE RANGE OF 
the exceptionally warm season of 1846*, the mammoth discovered 
by Lieut. Benkendorf on the banks of the Indigirka was thawed 
out of the tundra until it was revealed to the astonished eyes of the 
beholder, standing on its feet in the position in which it had been 
bogged. Had any elks or reindeer been in that spot at that time 
they might have been entombed in the same way, and preserved 
by the frosts of the winter till they were liberated again by the 
rare chance of their place of sepulture being invaded by warm 
floods from the south. The thaw in that year proceeded so rapidly 
that Lieut. Benkendorf and his Cossacks narrowly escaped the 
alternative of being entombed in the soft morass, or of being swept 
out northwards into the Arctic Sea, as his mammoth was, to join 
the vast assembly of mammoths and reindeer and other animals 
which have been swept down in a similar fashion. 
The remains of the animal occur throughout Russian Asia; and 
the singular notice of fossil ivory being brought for sale at Khiva, 
by an enterprising Arabian traveller, Abou-el-Cassim, in the middle 
of the tenth century, applies to the mammoth from the old Bulgaria 
on the Lower Volga‘. 
Nor is a variety of the mammoth absent from Asia Minor, since 
the remains of an elephant (Z. armeniacus ), discovered near Erzeroum, 
have been determined by Dr. Falconer to be intermediate between 
the mammoth and the Indian elephant. And it is an interesting 
fact to note that in Asia Minor, as in the Pleistocene of Europe, it 
is associated with the horse, stag, bison, and woolly (?) rhinoceros, 
all of which are described by Dr. Brandt from Persia in 1870. 
The elephant? was living in the valley of the Euphrates in the 
sixteenth century before Christ, when that district was invaded by 
the Egyptians, since a great hunting of elephants by the Pharaoh, 
Thothmes III., in the neighbourhood of Nineveh, has been recorded 
in an Egyptian inscription published by M. Chabas. This im- 
portant discovery brings Hiephas armeniacus into the same geo- 
graphical region as the Indian elephant (whichever variety or 
species those in question may have been), and shows that the 
fossil and living elephants of Asia in ancient times were not sepa- 
rated from each other by impassable geographical barriers or wide 
spaces of mountain and desert. 
* Middendorf, ‘ Sibirische Reise,’ iv. ‘ Die Thierwelt Sibiriens,’ p. 1082. 4to. 
1867. This account is translated in my essay on the ‘‘ Range of the Mammoth” 
quoted above. 
t ‘Les Peuples du Caucase, ou Voyage d’Abou-el-Cassim,’ par M. C. D’Ohsson, 
page 80. ‘On trouve souvent dans la Boulgarie des os (fossiles) d’une grandeur 
prodigieuse. J’ai vu une dent qui avait deux palmes de large sur quatre de 
_ long, et un crane qui ressemblait 4 une hutte (arabe). On y déterre des dents 
semblables aux défenses d’éléphants, blanche comme la neige et pesant jusqu’a 
deux cents menns. On ne sait pas a quel animal elles ont appartenu, mais on les 
transporte dans le Khoragur (Kiva), ot elles se vendent a grand prix. On en 
fait des peignes, des vases et d’autres objets, comme on fagonne livoire; toute- 
fois cette substance est plus dure que l’ivoire; jamais elle ne se brise.” 
This is extracted by the learned D’Ohsson from an Arabic manuscript of the 
middle of the tenth century. 
¢ Chabas, ‘Etudes sur I’ Antiquité Historique d’aprés les sources égyptiennes,’ 
2nd edit. p. 124. 
