14 
Bay, as described by Sir John Richardson, would seem to be an almost 
decisive proof of its existence at a time when the temperature of the 
shores of the Polar Sea was sufficiently genial to allow of a vegetation 
affording forage and cover to the great herds of mammals which have 
left their bones there with buried fossilized trees, attesting the presence 
of a forest at a latitude now unapproached save by shrubs such as the 
dwarf birch, and by that only at a considerable distance to the south. 
The elk of the present day, so far as we understand his habits, unlike 
the musk ox or reindeer, for which lichens and scanty grasses in the 
valleys of the barren grounds under the Polar Circle afford a sufficient 
sustenance, is almost exclusively a wood eater, and could not have lived 
in the locality above indicated under the present physical aspects of the 
coasts of Arctic America , any more than the herds of buffaloes, horses, 
oxen, and sheep, whose remains are mentioned by Admiral Von 
Wrangel as having been found in the greatest profusion in the interior 
of the islands of New Siberia, associated with mammoth bones, could 
now exist in that icy wilderness. On these grounds, therefore, a high 
antiquity is claimed for the sub-genus A Ices, probably as great as that 
of the reindeer. 
“Passing on to pre-historic times, when the remains of the species 
found in connection with human implements prove its subserviency as 
an article of food to the hunters of old, we find the bones of Cervus alces 
in most of the Swiss and other Lake Dwellings, and in refuse-heaps of 
that age ; whilst in a recent work on travel in Palestine, by the Rev. H. B. 
Tristram, we have evidence of the great and ancient Fauna which then 
overspread temperate Europe and Asia having had a yet more southerly 
extension ; for he discovered a limestone cavern in the Lebanon, near 
Beyrout, containing a breccious deposit teeming with the debris of the 
feasts of pre-historic man — flint chippings evidently used as knives, 
mixed with bones in fragments, and teeth, assignable to a reindeer, a 
bison, and an elk. 1 If,’ says the author, i as Mr. Boyd Dawkins con- 
siders, these teeth are referable to the now exclusively northern quad- 
rupeds, we have evidence of the reindeer and elk having been the food 
of man in the Lebanon not long before the historic period ; for there is 
no necessity to put back to any date of immeasurable antiquity the 
deposition of these remains in a limestone cavern. And,’ he adds* with 
significant reference to the great extension of the ancient zoological 
province of which we are speaking, ‘ there is nothing more extraordinary 
in this occurrence than in the discovery of the bones of the tailless hare 
of Siberia in the breccias of Sardinia and Corsica.’” — Vol. v., No. 119, 
p. 233. 
