492 
HABITATION OF MAMMOTHS AND THEIR DESTRUCTION. 
Habitation and Destruction of the Mammoths. — Though mammoths occur in cer- 
tain quantities on the flanks of the Ural, thus leading us to believe, that when alive 
they inhabited the tract where their skeletons are entombed, it must be recollected, 
that as by other proofs we have already endeavoured to show the comparatively 
recent elevation of the Ural crest, this region cannot be looked upon as having 
been rendered highly mountainous until the very period when great numbers of 
these animals tvere destroyed — a destruction which we believe to have been mainly 
accomplished when the present watersheds between Europe and Asia were deter- 
mined. 
Let us suppose, then, that the mammoths and their associates ranged over these 
hills, when they formed the elevated edge of an eastern continent. Further, 
let it be assumed (and this, indeed, is quite in accordance with the physical 
features of this region), that the greater number of the broad depressions which are 
now filled with auriferous and mammoth detritus were then occupied by lakes, in the 
grounds around which these extinct quadrupeds had long lived, and into whose 
shores or bottoms their bones had been washed for ages, and we shall then have 
before us the conditions which will best explain the Uralian phenomenon. No 
one can observe -what the Russian miner has accomplished, by damming up the 
existing rivers, and thus forming artificial lakes in every sinuous tract in which 
ores are worked, without being naturally led to the idea which we suggest, that 
larger and deeper lakes were formerly in existence, — lakes, in fact, which in still 
more primaeval times fed the great rivers that washed the Permian detritus to the 
sea then existing upon the -west. Granting these premises, all the relations of the 
Uralian mammoth alluvia may, it appears to us, be rationally explained ; for in 
some of the most violent movements of elevation which gave rise to the present 
central watershed, we may readily conceive how, their barriers being broken down, 
these lacustrine waters were poured off, and how their shingly bottoms and shores, 
already containing bones of mammoths, were desiccated and raised up into the 
irregular mounds which now constitute the auriferous alluvia. The very nature of 
the auriferous shingle, with its subangular fragments, so completely resembles the 
detritus of lakes, and is so unlike the gravel formed on the shore of seas, that 
time to time have been known to them or their predecessors. The mammoth of their legend is a great 
subterranean monster delighting in ice caverns, and to whom they attach a superstitious reverence, believing 
that the man who exposes the creature to day, thereby kills it and brings misfortune on his family. This 
serves to explain, why it is so difficult to obtain, through the natives, the disinterment of an entire animal. 
