FOSSIL REMAINS. 
599 
to leave a small end or knob sticking up ; they were dispersed very irregularly. 
Remains of the musk ox were found on this shoal, along with those of elephants. 
The few specimens taken out of the cliff, or more properly from the debris, 
on the front of it (for none, I believe, were taken out of the very cliff), were in a 
better state of preservation than those which had been alternately covered and 
left exposed by the flux and reflux of the tide, or imbedded in the mud and clay 
of the shoal. 
A very strong odour, like that of heated bones, was exhaled wherever the 
fossils abounded. Quantities of rolled stones, mostly of a brownish sandstone, 
lay upon the shoal, left dry by the receding sea. With these were also porphyritic 
pebbles. 
Parts of some of the tusks, where they had been imbedded in the clay and 
sand, were coloured blue by phosphate of iron, and many of the teeth were stained 
in the same manner. The circular layers of the tusks in the more decayed speci- 
mens were distinctly separated by a thin vein of fibrous gypsum. 
In those parts of the bay where there are no cliffs, the waves are kept at a 
distance from the land by a gravelly beach, which they have thrown up for a con- 
siderable extent round the entrance of the streams which come down the valleys. 
These beaches have formed rounded flats containing marshes or lakes : not un- 
frequently a rather luxuriant herbage covers their surface. The land behind them 
rises by a gentle slope. Great part of the shore of Kotzebue Sound is made up of 
a diluvial formation, similar to that on the south shore of Eschscholtz Bay. From 
Hut Peak to Hotham Inlet it exhibits many cliffs similar to those just described, and 
also others with an uniform and steep slope, partly covered with verdure, and partly 
exposing the dry sand and clay which compose them. The most elevated cliffs 
form the projecting head-land of Cape Blossom, and abound in ice, notwithstanding 
their southern aspect, particularly at Mosquito station and Cape Blossom. In 
their neighbourhood I observed the natives had recently formed coarse ivory 
spoons from the external layer of a fossil elephant’s tusk. The ice here in the 
end of September showed itself more abundantly than it did in the middle of the 
same month on the cliffs in Escholtz Bay which have a northern aspect.” 
Mr. Collie then proceeds to explain still further his ideas of the manner in 
which masses and sheets of pure ice may have been collected in hollows and 
fissures on and near the front of the clilF in Eschscholtz Bay. 
1st. By the accumulation of snow drifted into hollows subjacent to the over- 
hanging stratum of black boggy soil that forms the brink of the cliff, and sub- 
sequently converted into ice by successive thawing and freezing in spring and 
summer. 
