XOTES EXTKACTED EllOM THE JODllH.«. OF Mil. COUIE.
“ The attention of the world has been called to the remarkable cliffin which
fossil bones were found by Dr. Eschscholtz in August, 1810. On ray first visit to it
m the month of July, 1820, time did not permit me to do more than take a view of
the most eastern part, and examine the nature of the icy fronting which it presented.
At that tune I saw no traces of fossils ; this cliff faces to the N., and
extends in nearly a right line, with few interruptions, for two miles and a half,
and is iu general about ninety feet high. It is composed of clay and very fine
quartzy and micaceous sand, assuming a grayish appearance when dry. The land
behind rises gradually to an additional height of one hundred feet, and is covered
with a black bogp soil nourishing a brown and gray lichen, moss, several species
of enca;, gramima! and other herbaceous plants, and is intersected with a few valleys
containing small streams, and having their more protected declivities adorned
with shrubs of willow and dwarf betula (betula incana).
A continual waste of the cliff is produced at the upper part by its falling
down in considerable lumps to the bottom, where the debris remains for a longer
or shorter time, aud covers the front to a greater or less height, in some places,
almost to the very top. Large masses are sometimes seen rent off and standing
out from the body of the cliff ready to have their last slight hold washed away by
the next shower, or by a little more thawing and separation of the frozen earth
that serves them for attachment. The lumps of soil that fall are still covered with
the herbaceous and shrubby verdure that grew upon them. The perpendicular
front ofthe cliff of frozen mud and sand is every summer gradually decreasing by
the melting of the ice between its particles into water, which trickles dowitoand
carries with it loose particles of earth. In some portions ofthe cliff the earthy
surface IS protected with ice, partly the effect of snow driven into the hollows and
fissures, and partly from the congelation of water, which may have collected in
chinks or cavities : these masses of ice dissolve in summer, and the water running
from them carries with it any earth that lies in its way, and mixes itself with, and
moves forward, the mass of debris below. By this gradual thawing and falling of
the cliff, the black boggy soil at the surface becomes undermined, and assumes
the projecting and overhanging appearance which is so remarkable. At the base
ofthe greater part of the cliff the debris is washed by the sea at full tide, and
being gradually carried away by the retiring waters, is spread out into an extensive
■shoal along the coast. It was in-this shoal, where it is left dry by the ebbing tide,
to the distance of fifty or a hundred yards from the cliff, that the greater numbcl
of the fossil bones and teeth were discovered, many of them so concealed as only
to leave a small end or knob sticking up; they were dispersed very irregularly,
llcinains 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 specimens
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 considerable
extent round the entrance of the streams which come down the vallevs.
These beaches have formed rounded flats containing marshes or lakes: not unfrequently
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, particulai’ly at IMosquito 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 wliich 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 ofthe cliffin Eschscholtz Bay.
1st. By the accumulation of snow drifted into hollows subjacent to the overhanging
stratum of black bogg'y soil that forms the brink of the diff; and subsequently
converted into ice by successive thawing and freezing in spring and