of the earth in which they occur. Too much stress has, I think, been laid on the
circumstance of the mammoth in Siberia being covered with hair. We have living
examples of animals in warm latitudes which are not less abundantly covered with
hair and wool in proportion to their size than the elephant at the mouth of the
Lena. Such is the hyæna villosa lately noticed at the cape by Dr. Smith, and
described (vol. xv. plate 2, page 463, Linn. Trans.) as having the hair on the neck
and body very long and shaggy, measuring in many places, but particularly about
the sides and back, at least six inches ; again, the thick shaggy covering on the
anterior part on the body of the male lion, and the hairy coat of the camel (both of
them inhabitants of the warmest climates), present analogies which show that no
conclusive argument in proof that the Siberian elephant was the inhabitant of a cold
climate can be drawn from the fact ofthe skin ofthe frozen carcass at the mouth
of the Lena having been covered with coarse hair and wool ; but even if it were
proved that the climate of the arctic regions was the same both before and after the
extirpation of these animals, still must we refer to some great catastrophe to
account for the fact of their universal extirpation, and from those who deny the
occurrence of snch catastrophe, it may fairly be demanded why these extinct animals
have not continued to live on to the present hour. It is vain to contend that
they have been subdued and extirpated by man, since whatever may be conceded
as possible with respect to Europe, it is in the highest degree improbable that he
could have exercised such influence over the whole vast wilderness of Northern
Asia, and almost impossible that he could have done so in the boundless forests of
North America. The analogy of the non-extirpation of the elephant and rhinoceros
on the continent and islands of India, where man has long been at least as far advanced
in civilization, and much more populous than he can ever have been in the frozen
wilds of Siberia, shows that he does not extirpate the living species ofthese genera
in places where they are his fellow-tenants of the present surface of the earth.
The same non-extirpation of the elephant and rhinoceros occurs also in the less
civilized regions of Africa ; still further, it maybe contended, that if man had
invaded the territories of the mammoth and its associates until ho became the
instrument of their extirpation, we should have found, ere now, some ofthe usual
indications which man, even in his wildest state, must leave behind him ; some few
traces of savage utensils, arrows, knives, and other instruments of stone and bone,
and the rudest pottery; or, at all events, some bones of man himself would, ere
this, have been discovered amongst the numberless remains of the lost species wliich
he had extirpated. It follows, therefore, from the absence of human bones and of
works of art in the same deposits with the remains of mammoths, that man did not
exist in these northern regions of the earth at or before the time in which the
mammoths were destroyed; and the enormous accumulation of the wreck of mountains
that has been mixed up with their remains points to some great aqueous
revolution as the cause by which their sudden and total extirpation was effected.
It cannot be contended, that like small and feeble species, they may have been
destroyed by wild animals more powerful than themselves. The bulk and strength
ofthe mammoth and rhinoceros, the two largest quadrupeds in the creation, render
such an hypothesis utterly untenable.
The state of the argument then respecting the former climate of the polar regions
is nearly as follows;—It is probable that in remote periods, when the earliest strata
were deposited, the temperature of a great part of the northern hemisphere equalled
or exceeded that of our modern tropics, and that it has been reduced to its present
state by a series of successive changes. The evidence of this high temperature and of
these changes consists in the regular and successive variations in the character of
extinct plants and animals which vve find buried one above another in the successive
strata that compose the crust of the globe. These have in modern times been investigated
with sufficient care and knowledge of the subject to render it almost certain
that successive changes, from extreme to moderate heat, have taken place in those
parts of the northern hemisphere which constitute central and southern Europe;
and although we are not yet enough acquainted with the details of the geology of
the arctic regions to apply this argument to them with the same precision and to
the same extent as to lower latitudes, still we have detached examples of organic
remains in high latitudes sufficient to show the former existence of heat in the regions
where they are found—a few detached spots within the arctic circle that can
be shown to have been once the site of extensive coral reefs are as decisive in
proof that the climate in these spots was warm at the time when these corals lived
and grew into a reef, as, on the other hand, the carcass of a single elephant preserved
in ice is decisive of the existence of continual and intense cold ever since
the period at which it perished. We have for some time known that in and near Melville
Island, and it has been ascertained by Captain Beechey’s expedition, that at Cape
Thompson, near Beering’s Strait, there occur within the arctic circle extensive rocks
of lime-stone containing many of the same fossil shells and fossil corals that abound
in the carboniferous lime-stone of Derbyshire: the remains of fossil marine turtles
also (chclonia radiata) have been ascertained by Professor Fischer to exist in Siberia.
These are enough to show that the climate could not have been cold at the
time and place when they were deposited; and the analogy of adjacent European
latitudes renders it probable that the same cooling processes that were going on in
them extended their influence to the polar regions also, producing successive
reductions of temperature, accompanied by corresponding changes in the animal
4< i2