4376 Notices of New Books. 



immediate neighbourhood, and not, as some have supposed, in warmer 

 and more distant regions. 



" It seems also to us to be impossible that ice could have been the 

 vehicle by which whole bodies or complete skeletons could have been 

 brought from warmer parallels and deposited in the vast cemeteries of 

 polar Siberia or in Eschscholtz Bay, for the simple reason that ice is not 

 the product of these warm countries. Nor does the difficulty seem 

 less of explaining how such a group of pachyderms and ruminants 

 could have been brought down by travelling glaciers from warmer 

 southern valleys of mountain ranges no longer in existence, without 

 admitting such extensive changes in the surface-level of the district 

 as would confound all our ideas of the distribution of the drift, as we 

 at present find it. 



" It is easier to imagine that the animals whose osseous remains 

 now engage our attention, ranged while living to the shores of an icy 

 sea, and that by some sudden deluge, or vast wave or succession of 

 waves, they were swept from their pasture-grounds. It is not neces- 

 sary that we should here discuss the extent of this deluge, or inquire 

 whether it covered simultaneously the North of Europe, Asia, and 

 America ; or operated by a succession of great waves or more local 

 inundations. What more immediately concerns our subject is to 

 know that in the drift containing marine shells of existing species, 

 and boulders borne far away from their parent cliffs, we have evidence 

 of diluvial action extending from the ultima Thule of the American 

 polar sea to far southwards in the valley of the Mississippi. 



" The identification of the fossil mammoth and rhinoceros of Eng- 

 land and Europe with those of Siberia by the first of living com- 

 parative anatomists, might lead us to conclude that the same fauna 

 inhabited the northern parts of the New and Old World ; but I think 

 that we shall find evidence in the bones of bovine animals brought 

 from Eschscholtz Bay, that an American type of ruminants was per- 

 ceptible even in that early age. 



" At the present time the moose deer and mountain sheep inhabit 

 districts of America suited to their habits up to the most northern li- 

 mits of the continent ; while the musk ox and reindeer go beyond its 

 shores to distant islands ; and the Arctic hare is a perennial resident 

 of the most northern of these islands that have been visited, or up to 

 the 76th parallel. Supposing the climate of North America, at a time 

 just antecedent to the drift period, to have been similar or nearly so 

 to that which now exists, the habits and ranges of the ferine animals 

 at the two dates, though the species differ, may have had a close ana- 

 logy. The mammoth and other beasts that browsed on the twigs of 



