Quadrupeds. 3 



and carry away large portions of their banks, and expose the bones 

 previously buried in the earth ; again, many others are found in 

 excavating for wells and the foundations of buildings. There is no 

 ground for adopting the hypothesis of Patrin, that these bones are 

 brought by the rivers from the mountains of India, where elephants 

 exist in a state of nature at the present day. Moreover, the bones are 

 310 less abundant on the banks of the Volga, Don and Jaik, which run 

 from the north ; and of the Lena, Indigirska, Kolima and Anadir 

 (which flow from the very cold mountains of Chinese Tartary, where 

 assuredly no elephants exist), than in the Ob or the Jenissea, and its 

 tributary streams ; of which the Irtisch is the only one that approaches 

 sufficiently near to the mountains of Thibet, to allow the application 

 of the hypothesis with any show of probability. They also exist in 

 the peninsula of Kamschatka, which they could not reach from India 

 without making an extraordinary circuit. 



Pallas tells us that there is no river or stream in all Asiatic Russia, 

 from the Don to the promontory of Tchutchis, on the banks or in the 

 bed of which the bones of elephants, and other animals foreign to the 

 climate, are not to be found; and this, he observes, is more particu- 

 larly the case with the rivers of the plains. These bones are found in 

 all latitudes, but ihe best ivory comes from the north, on account of 

 its being less exposed to the action of the elements. 



In answer to the hypothesis that these bones could result from human 

 expeditions (such, for instance, as that under Annibal, by which many 

 elephants were brought into Italy and never returned), their immense 

 numbers may be adduced as quite conclusive. Moreover, in many 

 places in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere, the bones are invari- 

 ably intermixed with those of other wild beasts of all sizes. The 

 bones are generally dispersed, and in but very few places have entire 

 skeletons been found, preserved as it were in sepulchres of sand. Pallas 

 seems to have overlooked one important fact, namely, that in certain 

 places skeletons of mammoths have been found, with portions of the 

 flesh and other soft parts still attached to them. It is the universal 

 opinion throughout Siberia, that mammoths have been found with the 

 flesh quite fresh and filled with blood ; this, although an exaggera- 

 tion, is founded on the fact that entire bodies have been discovered, 

 preserved in ice, with the flesh comparatively in a state of freshness. 

 Isbrand Ides speaks of a head, on which the flesh was decaying, and 

 of a frozen leg, as large as the body of a man : and Jean Bernhard 

 Muller mentions a tusk, the cavity of which was filled with a sub- 

 stance resembling coagulated blood. 



b2 



