IX.] 
THE NEW SIBERIAN ISLANDS. 
413 
perhaps more troubled by flies than the older, went farther 
north than these. 
Along with bones of the mammoth there are found on the 
New Siberian Islands, in not inconsiderable numbers, portions of 
the skeletons of other animal forms, little known, but naturally 
of immense importance for ascertaining the vertebrate fauna 
which lived at the same time with the mammoth on the plains 
of Siberia, and the New Siberian group of islands is not less 
remarkable for the “wood-hills,” highly enigmatical as to their 
mode of formation, which Hedenstrom found on the south coast 
of the northernmost island. These hills are sixty-four metres 
high, and consist of thick horizontal sandstone beds alternating 
with strata of fissile bituminous tree stems, heaped on each 
other to the top of the hill. In the lower part of the hill the 
tree stems lie horizontally, but in the upper strata they stand 
upright, though perhaps not rootfast.^ The flora and fauna of 
the island group besides are still completely unknown, and the 
fossils, among them ammonites with exquisite pearly lustre, 
which Hedenstrom brought home from the rock strata on 
Kotelnoj Island, hold out inducement to further researches, 
which ought to yield the geologist valuable information as to the 
former climate and the former distribution of land and sea on 
the surface of the globe. The knowledge of the hydrography 
of this region is besides an indispensable condition for judging 
of the state of the ice in the sea which washes the north coast 
of Asia. Here lies the single available starting-point for the 
exploration of the yet altogether unknown sea farther to the north, 
and from hills on the two northernmost islands Hedenstrom 
thought that across the sea to the north-west and north-east he 
saw obscure outlines of new land, on which no man had yet set 
his foot. All these circumstances confer on this group of islands 
1 Hedenstrom, loc. cit p. 128. To find stranded driftwood in an upright 
position is nothing’ uncommon. 
