REMOTE AGE OF THE N. COURSES OF THE GREAT SIBERIAN STREAMS. 499 
great distances be assigned to any rivers (and mariners have seen floating carcases 
in the ocean very far removed from the lands from whence they came), in no 
part of the world is it more probable, that such operations may have been carried 
on upon a gigantic scale, than from the northern shores of Siberia, where such 
enormous rivers must have continuously extended their influence to several de- 
grees of latitude beyond their mouths, and where the nature of the climate is sin- 
gularly favourable to the conservation of animal substances. 
And here let us say a word more on the ancient physical geography of this region. 
Such as are the present north-flowing courses of the great Siberian rivers, such we 
affirm they must have been from the very earliest periods, — from the time, in short, 
when the paleozoic rocks constituting the Altai and Ural Mountains and their 
dependencies were raised into dry lands, never more to be depressed beneath the 
waters of the ocean. Infinitely the loftiest and the grandest of these chains, the 
Altai with its snowy peaks (yet void of glaciers) ranging from west to east, is the 
great southern watershed from whence the Siberian rivers must, we say, have 
flowed from south to north during long ages, whilst the peculiarity of all the great 
counterforts or advanced ridges of that mighty chain, consists in their being com- 
posed of palaeozoic, metamorphic and igneous rocks, which equally extend from 
south to north in a number of long, low meridian, parallel ridges. These north 
and south ridges, of which the Ural is the westernmost, thus encase each river, and 
preventing its flexure to the east and west, have necessarily determined its course 
to the glacial ocean, from epochs long anterior to the creation of a mammoth. 
Looking to their low altitude above the sea, their muddy and sandy compo- 
sition, and also to the discovery hy Pallas of marine remains in many of them, we 
must believe that all the low promontories between the Obe, the Yenisei 1 and the 
Lena, which lie northwards of the ancient ridges and plateaux, were under the 
waters and estuaries at the periods when the mammoths ranged over the Ural, the 
Altai and the adjacent regions of Siberia, then above the sea 2 . Such of these 
1 We write Yenisei, like all other Russian words, as it is pronounced. The German J, as used by- 
Pallas and the early German explorers of distant parts of Russia, has unluckily found its way into all 
English maps. Pallas states, that the fossil hones which fall from the high cliffs of the Yenisei, opposite 
Krasnoyarsk, are so numerous, that on decomposing they form a substance which he calls “ Osteocolle.” 
(Vol, iv. p. 443. Fr. Ed. Sec also Appendix to Beechey’s Voyage.) 
2 The definition of the outlines of the land and sea during the mammoth period, or the extent to which 
marine estuaries entered into the continent of Siberia, including possibly even a separation of the Ural 
from the Altai, can alone be determined by the united labours of many observers. If the data of Pallas 
