SIMILAR MAMMOTH BURIAL IN WESTERN EUROPE. 
493 
independent of the entire absence of any marine remains whatever of tertiary or recent 
age, all along the immediate eastern flank of the Ural mountains, we have no 
hesitation in believing, that the gold deti'itus was accumulated during a terrestrial 
and lacustrine condition of the surface. One fact only which we have mentioned 
seems, at first sight, to militate against this view, viz. the deeply eroded surfaces 
of some of the palaeozoic rocks. But however these appearances may have been 
produced, it is manifest they could not have resulted from the denuding action of 
the same water, in which the shingly and slightly rounded angular detritus was 
formed. Such abraded surfaces may, to a great extent, have been produced, 
at periods long anterior to that of which we are now treating, and when the edges 
of the palaeozoic strata, first emerging from beneath the sea, left their irregular 
and water-worn surfaces to be filled with terrestrial and lacustrine deposits of 
after-days. 
In some cases, however, the denuding and abrading power of waters, produced 
both by the bursting of lakes and the change in the direction of the currents, 
must have been very considerable, for such alone would account for several of the 
appearances we have spoken of, and the transport of large blocks and enormous 
pepites of gold into broad lateral depressions. 
In proposing a lacustrine entombment for the Uralian mammals, we are borne 
out by the constant position of thick masses of silt and clay overlying the coarser 
shingle. If the deposits had been submarine — even if no traces of shells were 
visible, there might have been some indications of the action of the waves — some 
appearance of a coast-line : but nowhere can the geologist imagine such a former 
state, whilst the superposition of the clay to the shingle is best explained, on the 
hypothesis of formation under lacustrine or broad fluviatile conditions, which even- 
tually assumed a tranquil character. Such, in fact, are precisely the cases of the 
great valleys of the Rhine and the Danube ; and just as we have imagined that the 
mammoth lived in those Uralian tracts, when the adjacent parts of Siberia were 
occupied by lakes, so do we suppose that the like animals, whose bones are found, 
both in the coarse shingle of the Rhine and in the overlying loss near Baden- 
Baden, once lived upon the grounds which now constitute the Black Forest and 
adjacent Alpine tracts whence the detritus has been derived. With evidences 
of internal lakes and ancient rivers, in which the bones of some of its ancient 
quadrupeds were lodged, Great Britain, though evidently also the abode of mam- 
moths, is distinguished from the Ural and Siberia, in exhibiting around its coasts, 
3 s 
