4382 Notices of New Books, 



horns, and the finding of vertebrae of bovine animals lying in their 

 proper order of sequence, render it probable that entire carcasses were 

 there deposited, and that congelation followed close upon their en- 

 tombment. A gradual improvement of climate in modern times would 

 appear to be necessarv to account for the decay of the cliffs now in 

 progress, aud the exposure of the bones. The shallowness of the 

 water in Eschscholtz Bay, its narrowness, and its shelter from seaward 

 pressure by Choris Peninsula and Chamisso Island, preclude the no- 

 tion of icebergs coming with their cargoes from a distance having 

 been found upon the beach at that place. Neither is it more likely 

 that the bones and diluvial matters were deposited in the estuary of 

 Buckland's river, and subsequently elevated by one of the earth-waves 

 by which geologists solve many of their difficulties, for ice could not 

 subsist long as a flooring to warmer water. In short, further obser- 

 vations are still needed to form the foundations of a plausible theory. 

 " Dr. Goodridge describes the several cliffs in succession with much 

 detail, beginning with that next Elephant Point and proceeding to the 

 westward. His paper, though interesting throughout, is too long for 

 transcription entire, and I shall therefore merely abstract the most 

 material parts. He commences by stating that the unusually mild 

 season had produced great landslips, and exposed the structure of the 

 several eminences forming the cliffs more extensively than in the year 

 in which Captain Beechey visited them. Elephant Point, forming a 

 high promontory in 1826, had now subsided to a mere hillock by the 

 thawing of the icy substratum, as Kotzebue predicted would happen. 

 A pit was dug to some depth in the loose loamy soil of this hillock, 

 formed of the debris of the ruined cliff, at a point where the thigh- 

 bone of a mammoth protruded above the surface, without any ice 

 being found ; but on the east of the hill next in succession, a wedge- 

 shaped landslip had left a triangular chasm, whose floor, elevated 

 twenty feet above the beach, was bounded by walls fifty feet high, of 

 fine transparent ice; and its interior angle, reaching thirty feet back- 

 wards from the face of the cliff, exhibited an alluvium seemingly un- 

 disturbed since it was originally deposited, and consisting of regular 

 layers of drift and peat, covered with thick beds of broken sticks and 

 vegetable matter, over which lay a stratum of red river-gravel, then a 

 bed of argillaceous earth, capped by dry friable mould and surface 

 peat, nourishing its peculiar vegetation of coarse grass, moss, lichens, 

 &c. The icy side-walls showed bands or layers considerably inclined, 

 and testifying to their origin in drift snow ; and the size of the sticks 



