resembling the buffalo, prefers the stinted herbage of the arctic regions, and is able, by its periodical migrations, to outlive a northern winter. The jackal (Canis aureus) inhabits Africa, the warmer parts of Asia, and Greece; while the isatis, or arctic fox (Canis lagopus), resides in the arctic regions. The African hare and the polar hare have their geographical distribution expressed in their trivial names; '* and different species of bears thrive in tropical, temperate, and arctic latitudes. Other writers soon followed up the same line of argument, and Mr. Hodgson among others, in his account of the mammalia of Nepal, stated that the tiger was sometimes found at the very edge of perpetual snow in the Himalaya.† Pennant had previously mentioned, that it had been seen among the snows of Mount Ararat in Armenia, and later authorities have placed it beyond all doubt that a species of tiger identical with that of Bengal is common in the neighbourhood of Lake Aral, near Sussac, in the forty-fifth degree of North latitude. Humboldt remarks, that the part of Southern Asia now inhabited by this Indian species of tiger is separated from the Himalaya by two great chains of mountains, each covered with perpetual snow,-the chain of Kuenlun, lat. 35° N., and that of Mouztagh, lat. 42°,--so that it is impossible that these animals should merely have made excursions from India, so as to have penetrated in summer to the forty-eighth and fifty-third degrees of North latitude. They must remain all the winter north of the Mouztagh, or Celestial Mountains. The last tiger killed, in 1828, on the Lena, in lat. 521°, was in a climate colder than that of Petersburg and Stockholm.‡ A species of panther (Felis irbis), covered with long hair, has been discovered in Siberia, evidently inhabiting, like the tiger, a region north of the Celestial Mountains, which are in lat. 42°.§ In regard to the climate of the living elephant, the Rev. * Fleming, Ed. New Phil. Journ., No. xii. p. 282, 1829. The zebra, however, inhabits chiefly the extra-tropical parts of Africa. Journ. of Asiat. Soc., vol. i. p. 240. Humboldt, Fragmens de Géologie &c., tome ii. p. 388. Ehrenberg, Anu. des Sci. Nat., tome xxi. pp. 387, 390. § Ehrenberg, ibid. Robert Everest observes, that the greatest elevation at which it is found in a wild state is in the north-west Himalaya, at a place called Nahun, about 4,000 feet above the level of the sea, and in the 31st degree of N. lat., where the mean yearly temperature may be about 64° Fahrenheit, and the difference between winter and summer very great, equal to about 36° F., the month of January averaging 45°, and June, the hottest month, 91° F.* More recently, Von Schrenck, writing in 1858, announced that in Amoorland, part of North-Eastern Asia, then recently annexed to the Russian Empire, no less than 34 out of 58 living quadrupeds are identical with European species. Among those which are not European, some are arctic, others of tropical forms; in illustration of which, he states that the Bengal tiger, ranging sometimes northwards as far as lat. 42°, subsists chiefly on the flesh of the reindeer, while on the other hand, the small tailless hare or pika occasionally wanders from its polar haunts to parts of Amoorland as far south as 48°. In America, the jaguar has been seen wandering from Mexico as far north as Kentucky, lat. 37° N.‡, and in the opposite direction as far as 42° S. in South America,-a latitude which corresponds to that of the Pyrenees in the northern hemisphere.§ The range of the puma is still wider, for it roams from the equator to the Straits of Magellan, being often seen at Port Famine, in lat. 53° 38′ S. When the Cape of Good Hope was first colonised, the two-horned African rhinoceros was found in lat. 34° 29' S., accompanied by the elephant, hippopotamus, and hyæna. Here the migration of all these species towards the south was arrested by the ocean; but if the African continent had been prolonged still farther, and the land had been of moderate elevation, it is highly probable that they might have extended their range to a greater distance from the tropics. Now, if the Indian tiger can range in our own times to the southern borders of Siberia, or skirt the snows of the Himalaya, and if the puma can reach the fifty-third degree of *Everest on Climate of Foss. Eleph., Journ. of Asiat. Soc., No. 25, p. 21. Nat. Hist. Rev., vol. i. p. 12, 1861. Antiquity of Man, p. 158. Rafinesque, Atlantic Journ., p. 18. § Darwin's Journal of Travels in South America, &c., 1832 to 1836, in Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, p. 159. latitude in South America, we may easily understand how large species of the same genera may once have inhabited Northern Europe. The mammoth (E. primigenius), already alluded to, as occurring fossil in England, was decidedly different from the two living species of elephants, one of which is limited to Asia, south of the 31° of N. lat., the other to Africa, where it extends, as before stated, as far south as the Cape of Good Hope. The bones of the fossil species are very widely spread over Europe and North America; but are nowhere in such profusion as in Siberia, particularly near the shores of the Frozen Ocean. But if we are thence to conclude that this animal preferred a northern climate, it will naturally be asked, by what food was it sustained, and why does it not still survive near the Arctic circle? * Pallas and other writers describe the bones of the mammoth as occurring in a very fresh state throughout all the Lowland of Siberia, stretching in a direction west and east, from the borders of Europe to the extreme point nearest America, from south to north, from lat. 60° and from the base of the mountains of Central Asia to the shores of the Arctic Sea. (See map, fig. 7.) Within this space, scarcely inferior in area to the whole of Europe, fossil ivory has been collected almost everywhere, on the banks of the Irtish, Obi, Yenesei, Lena, and other rivers. The elephantine remains do not occur in the marshes, but where the banks of the rivers present lofty precipices of sand and clay; from which circumstance Pallas very justly inferred that, if sections could be obtained, similar bones might be found in all the elevated lands intervening between the great rivers. Strahlenberg, indeed, had stated, before the time of Pallas, that wherever any of the great rivers overflowed and cut out fresh channels during floods, more fossil remains of the same kind were invariably disclosed. As to the position of the bones, Pallas found them in some The speculations which follow, on the ancient physical geography of Siberia, and its former fitness as a residence for the mammoth, were first given in their present form in my 4th edition, June 1835. Sir R. Murchison and his companions, MM. de Verneuil and Keyserling, in their great work on the Geology of Russia, 1845 (vol. i. p. 497), have, in citing this chapter, declared that their investigations have led them to similar conclusions. simply with fossil wood, or lignite, such as, he says, might places imbedded together with marine remains; in others, Map showing the course of the Siberian rivers from south to north, from temperate to arctic regions, in the country where Oby R. 30 the Yenesei, below the city of Krasnojarsk, in lat. 56°, have been derived from carbonised peat. On the banks of he observed grinders and bones of elephants, in strata of yellow and red loam, alternating with coarse sand and gravel, in which was also much petrified wood of the willow and other trees. Neither here nor in the neighbouring country were there any marine shells, but merely layers of black coal.* But grinders of the mammoth were collected much farther down the same river, near the sea, in lat. 70°, mixed with marine petrifactions.† Many other places in Siberia are cited by Pallas, where sea shells and fishes' teeth accompany the bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and Siberian buffalo, or bison (Bos priscus). Carcasses of elephant and rhinoceros preserved in frozen mud. But it is not on the Obi nor the Yenesei, but on the Lena, farther to the east, where, in the same parallels of latitude, the cold is far more intense, that fossil remains were first found in the most wonderful state of preservation. In 1772, Pallas obtained from Wiljuiskoi, in lat. 64°, from the banks of the Wiljui, a tributary of the Lena, the carcass of a rhinoceros (R. tichorhinus), taken from the sand in which it must have remained congealed for ages, the soil of that region being always frozen to within a slight depth of the surface. This carcass, which was compared to a natural mummy, emitted an odour like putrid flesh, part of the skin being still covered with short crisp wool and with black and grey hairs. In allusion to the quantity of hair on the foot and head conveyed to St. Petersburg, Pallas asked whether this animal might not have inhabited a cold region of Middle Asia, its clothing being so much warmer than that of the African rhinoceros.‡ Professor Brandt, of St. Petersburg, in a letter to Baron Alex. Von Humboldt, dated 1846, adds the following particulars respecting this wonderful fossil relic:-'I have been so fortunate as to extract from cavities in the molar teeth of the Wiljui rhinoceros a small quantity of its half-chewed food, among which fragments of pine-leaves, one-half of the seed of a polygonaceous plant, and very minute portions of wood with porous cells (or small fragments of coniferous *Pallas, Reise im Russ. Reiche, pp. 409, 410. + Nov. Com. Petrop., vol. xvii. p. 584. Ibid. p. 591. |