478 
MAMMOTH BONES IN THE GOLD SHINGLE. 
rocks or granite which has penetrated them is composed of their various debris, 
chiefly angular, and in thickness from eighteen to twenty feet. It is, in fact, local 
drift, and is spread over the whole of the adjacent depression with little reference 
to the streamlet which now flows in it, and which is made to follow the works ; 
for by its water alone is the ore washed out of the detritus. We shall not describe 
these works, though we may state that they are more productive in those spots 
where the broken materials and coarse sands are most ferruginous, and that during 
the washing process, the black, glancing grains of magnetic iron ore, form a good 
indication of the presence of gold. Our chief aim is to show the position in which 
the bones of mammoths were found in this coarse debris, covered by clay, bog- 
earth and soil. 
Berezof rivulet, • 
a. Auriferous rocks “ in situ.” b. Auriferous detritus. 
c. Overlying clay covered by humus and bog. > — Position of mammoth bones. 
The above diagram at once explains these relations ; for, as we have before 
said, the drift in which the gold occurs, fills up all the original inequalities of the 
surface of the rocks ; and in one of the lowest of these depressions, from eighteen 
to twenty feet below the surface and at least 200 feet distant from the little river, 
very well-preserved tusks and other bones of a mammoth were discovered by M. 
Koksharof, sen. ', formerly director of these works. Now the coarse gold, gravel 
and sand is covered by a thick mass of clay, which is wholly unstratified, and this 
again by a poor imperfect grassy peat, and, lastly, by the sterile humus or soil of 
the country. With the exception of the gold in the gravel, these relations may 
be paralleled in many other tracts of Europe. For example, just in similar 
coarse gravel and sand, have often been found the bones of mammoths and other 
extinct animals in the ancient valleys of the Rhine and Danube, and many other 
places. There, as in the Ural, the coarse detritus is usually covered with the finer 
materials of sediment, either in the form of clay or of sand and loss. In the upper 
clay of this place, as in the loss of the Rhine, similar remains have also been found ; 
and all that we now point out is, that by the distribution of the materials in which 
such remains occur they could not have been placed there by the puny Berezof 
1 M. Koksharof presented these bones to Mr. Murchison, and they are now in London. 
