187 
tops broken off or crushed as if they had been thrown with 
great violence from the south on a bank, and then heaped up. 
So it is clear that at the time when the elephants and trunks 
of trees were thrown up together, one flood,* * * § extended from 
the centre of the Continent to the furthest barrier existing in 
the sea as it is now. 
Mr. Howorth says, “We find the mammoth remains aggre- 
gated in hecatombs on the pieces of high grounds, and not 
scattered indiscriminately, f An immediate change of climate 
seems to have supervened, so as to allow the bodies of the 
mammoth to be at once frozen, and thus preserved intact. It 
seems that the animals fled to the higher eminences for 
safety when the waters spread around them,;}; reminding us of 
the deluge of Deucalion, as described by Horace — 
“ Omne cum Proteus pecus egit altos 
Visere montes.” 
No human remains nor works of art are met with in these 
deposits. “The appearance of the Tundra,” § or alluvial 
plain, “ seems to point to a not very distant submergence of 
the whole of Siberia, as far south as the highlands which 
roughly mark the present northern limit of trees but the 
climate in the Mammoth epoch was milder, for, “remote from 
the present line of trees, among the steep banks of the lakes 
and rivers, are found large birch-trees, complete, with bark, 
branches, and roots. At first sight they appear well preserved, 
but on digging them up they are found in a thorough state of 
decay. The first living birch-trees are not now found nearer 
than three degrees to the south, and then only as shrubs.” 
I direct particular attention to this, for it is evident that the 
era in which these trees lived and flourished coincided with 
the (Pleistocene ?) era of the mammoths, and of a much more 
genial temperature than now prevails. The period during 
which a birch-tree can be continually decaying until it turns 
absolutely to dust, marks out exactly the length of this space, 
and may be placed side by side with the accumulation of 
stalagmite in, at all events, the upper floor of Kent’s Cavern. 
Are we to believe that 250,000 years have elapsed since these 
birch-trees lived, and that the bodies of the mammoths have 
been kept in ice all this long age so fresh that the Siberian 
wolves can now feed and fatten upon them ? 
* See Falconer’s Palccon. Mem., p. 243. 
t Proceedings of the British Assoc. 1869, p. 90. 
+ Appendix D. 
§ Hedenslrom, quoted by Southall, p. 327. 
