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APPENDIX. 
to throw light on the curious and perplexing question, as to what was the climate 
of this portion of the world at the time when it was inhabited by animals now so 
foreign to it as the elephant and rhinoceros, and as to the manner in which, not 
only their teeth and tusks and dislocated portions of their skeletons, but, in some 
remarkable instances, the entire carcasses of these beasts, with their flesh and 
skin still perfect, became entombed in ice, or in frozen mud and gravel, over 
such extensive and distant regions of the northern hemisphere. 
The bones from Eschscholtz Bay, like most of those we find in diluvial de- 
posits, are no way mineralized : they are much altered in colour, being almost 
black, and are to a certain degree decomposed and weakened ; yet they retain so 
much animal matter, that not only a strong odour like that of burnt horn is emitted 
from them on the application of heated iron, but a musty and slightly ammoniacal 
smell is perceptible on gently rubbing their surface. 
It must not, however, be inferred that this high state of preservation can 
exist only in bones that have been imbedded in frozen mud or fi-ozen gravel, since 
dense clay impermeable to water has been equally effective in preserving the re- 
mains of the same extinct species of animals in the milder climate of England. 
There are in the Oxford Museum bones of elephant and rhinoceros from diluvial 
clay, in Warwickshire and Norfolk, that are scarcely at all more decomposed than 
those brought by Captain Beechey from Eschscholtz Bay, and are nearly of the 
same colour and consistence with them. I have also a fragment of the tusk of an 
elephant from the coast of Yorkshire, near Bridlington, of which great part had 
been made into boxes by a turner of ivory before the remainder came into my 
possession ; and on comparing the state of the residuary portion of this tusk from 
Yorkshire with that of the scoop made of a fossil tusk by the Esquimaux in Esch- 
scholtz Bay, I find the difference scarcely appreciable. 
It is mentioned, both by the Russian and English officers, that a strong odour 
like that of burnt bones is emitted from the mud of the cliffs in which they 
discovered these animal remains in Eschscholtz Bay : other observers have stated 
the same thins of the mud cliffs in Siberia, near the mouth of the Lena, which con- 
tain similar organic remains. But it is also stated by Mr. Collie that a like odour 
was perceived at the base of another mud cliff in Shallow Inlet, near Eschscholtz 
Bay, where there were no bones ; and as in this latter case we must attribute it to 
some cause unconnected with the bones, and probably to gaseous exhalations from 
the mud itself, we may, I think, draw the same inference as to the origin of the 
odour in all the other cases also ; thus in Eschscholtz Bay, where nearly all the 
bones were collected at the base of the cliff on the beach below high water, how 
can the presence of two or three bones only, lying half way up the cliff, account 
