VIEWS OF LYELL, HUMBOLDT AND OWEN. 
497 
into which their bones had been washed, would necessarily render the climate much 
more intensely cold 1 . 
But even if it be admitted that the climate must have been more mild when 
mammoths lived than at the present day, there still occurred the obvious diffi- 
culty, that without some entire change in the nature of its vegetation, of which 
the surface of Siberia offers no indications, by no possibility could a great phyllo- 
phagous, or branch-eating animal like the true elephants (which require rich Asiatic 
jungles for their sustenance), have lived in a region of fir-trees, birch, willows and 
moss. Comparative anatomy and physiology have here, however, fortunately 
come to the assistance of the geologist, and in this, as in many other of his 
darkest paths, have been his surest beacons. Examining and comparing the 
composite structure of the very numerous teeth of the mammoth, Professor Owen 
has ascertained that they possess a peculiarity in the greater proportion of the 
dense enamel, which essentially distinguishes them from the teeth of the Asiatic 
or African elephant, and which specially provided the mammoth with the means of 
subsisting upon the coarser ligneous tissues of trees and shrubs. In short, this 
great zoological authority, combining the consideration of the peculiar structure of 
their teeth with the nature of their epidermis and coverings, has come to the con- 
clusion, that the mammoth was, by its very organization, a meet companion for 
the rein-deer and other inhabitants of the north® ! 
Applying the views of Humboldt, we might well admit, that the rise of the Ural 
and Altai mountains, and with them of enormous masses of the continent of Asia, 
must have so refrigerated Siberia, that its forests, which in the halcyon days of 
mammoths may have extended in certain promontories to near the Icy Sea, had 
necessarily shrunk back to their present limits, and left these coasts entirely to the 
rein-deer and its mosses. But to require our belief that the mammoth ever lived 
in the northernmost tracts of Siberia is uncalled for, since geologists well know 
that the wide and low tracts of Northern Siberia, in which its remains are most 
abundant, w r ere then evidently beneath the sea, and the bones must have been 
1 There is no portion of Mr. Lyell’s speculations upon ancient physical geography which has impressed 
us with greater respect for his talents, than his view of the adaptation of the mammoths to a residence 
in the former Siberia ; and we rejoice that the geological evidences we have brought to bear upon the 
question essentially sustain his inferences. See Lyell, Principles of Geology, 4th Ed. vol. i. pp. 141, 150 
et seq., where the whole question is discussed with references to Dr. Fleming and other zoologists. 
2 See Owen’s History of British Fossil Mammalia and Birds, 1844, p. 261 ei seq. 
