ON THE RANGE OF THE MAMMOTH. 
283 
structive, and well preserved. The principal were young shoots 
of the fir and pine; a quantity of young fir cones, also in a 
chewed state, were mixed with the mass As we were 
eviscerating the animal, I was as careless and forgetful as my 
Jakuti, who did not notice that the ground was sinking under 
their feet, until a fearful scream warned me of their misfortune, 
as I was still groping in the animal’s stomach. Shocked I 
sprang up, and beheld how the river was burying in its waves 
our five Jakuti, and our laboriously saved beast. Fortunately, 
the boat was near, so that our poor work-people were all saved, 
but the Mammoth was swallowed up by the waves, and never 
more made its appearance.” 
This most graphic account affords a key for the solution of 
several problems hitherto unknown. It is clear that the animal 
must have been buried where it died, and that it was not trans- 
ported from any place further up stream, to the south, where 
the climate is comparatively temperate. The presence of fir in 
the stomach proves that it fed on the vegetation which is now 
found at the northern part of the woods as they join the low, 
desolate, treeless, moss-covered tundra, in which the body lay 
buried — a fact that would necessarily involve the conclusion 
that the climate of Siberia, in those ancient days, differed but 
slightly from that of the present time. Before this discovery 
the food of the Mammoth had not been known by direct evi- 
dence. The circumstances under which it was brought to light 
enable us to see how animal remains could be entombed in the 
frozen soil without undergoing decomposition, which Baron 
Cuvier and Dr. Buckland agreed in accounting for, by a sudden 
cataclysm, and Sir Charles Lyell by the hypothesis of their 
having been swept down by floods, from the temperate into the 
arctic zone. In this particular case the marsh must have been 
sufficiently soft to admit of the Mammoth sinking in, while 
shortly after death the temperature must have been lowered so 
as to arrest decomposition up to the very day on which the 
body arose under the eyes of M. Benkendorf, in the unusually 
warm year of 1846, when the tundra was thawed to a most 
unusual depth, and converted into a morass, permeable by 
water. Had any Mammoths been alive in that year, and had 
they strayed beyond the limits of the woods, into the tundra, 
some would, in all human probability, have been engulphed, and, 
when once covered up, the normal cold of winter would suffice 
to prevent the thaw of the carcases, except in most unusual 
seasons, such as that in which this one was discovered. Pro- 
bably, many such warm summers intervened since its death, 
but as it was preserved from the air, they would not accelerate 
putrefaction to any great degree. In this way the problem of 
its entombment and preservation may be solved by an appeal 
