60 Dr. J. Rae on Mammoth-remains. 



on the great rivers of Siberia, making due allowance for the 

 much higher northern latitude to which these streams run before 

 reaching the sea, and for the difference in size of the fauna that 

 used to frequent their banks. 



When animals, more especially those having horns, tusks, or 

 otherwise heavily weighted heads, are drifting down a river, 

 the position of the bodies may lie in any direction as regards 

 the course of the stream, as long as they are in water deep 

 enough to float them ; but the moment they get into a shallow 

 place, the head, which sinks deepest (or, as sailors say, " draws 

 most water "), takes the ground, whilst the body, still remaining 

 afloat, swings to the current, just as a boat or ship does when 

 brought to anchor in a tideway. 



It is probable that the mammoths, having been drowned by 

 breaking through the ice or in swimming across the river in 

 spring when the banks were lined with high precipitous drifts 

 of snow, which prevented them from getting out of the water, 

 or killed in some other way, floated down stream, perhaps for 

 hundreds of miles, until they reached the shallows at the mouth, 

 where the heads, loaded with a great weight of bone and tusks, 

 would get aground in 3 or 4 feet of water, whilst the bodies 

 still afloat would swing round with the current as already 

 described. 



The Yenesei flows from south to north, so the heads, being 

 pointed up stream, would be to the south*. 



Supposing, then, these bodies anchored as above in 3 or 4 feet 

 water ; as soon as the winter set in, they would be frozen up in 

 this position. The ice in so high a latitude as 70 c or 75° north 

 would acquire a thickness of 5 or 6 feet at least, so that it would 

 freeze to the bottom on the shallows where the mammoths were 

 anchored. In the spring, on the breaking up of the ice, this 

 ice being solidly frozen to the muddy bottom, "would not rise to 

 the surface, but remain fixed, with its contained animal remains, 

 and the flooded stream would rush over both, leaving a covering 

 of mud as the water subsided. 



Part of this fixed ice, but not the whole, might be thawed 

 away during summer ; and (possibly, but not necessarily) next 

 winter a fresh layer of ice with a fresh supply of animal re- 

 mains might be formed over the former stratum ; and so the 

 peculiar position and perfect state of preservation of this im- 



* Not many years ago, when buffalo were very abundant on the Saskat- 

 chewan, hundreds of them were sometimes drowned in one season whilst 

 swimming across the river ; and many reindeer, moose, and other animals 

 are annually destroyed in this way in other large American rivers. 



Sir Charles Lyell mentions a number of yaks being seen frozen up in 

 one of the Siberian rivers, which, on the breaking up of the ice in spring, 

 would be liberated and float down the stream. 



