Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/134

106 The mammoth (Fig. 22) is very abundant in the caverns and river deposits of Britain and of France, and is known to have ranged over the Pyrenees into Spain, from the discovery of specimens in the zinc-mines of Santander. It has been proved by Prof. E. Lartet and Dr. Falconer to have lived in the neighbourhood of Rome at a time when the volcanoes of central Italy were active, and poured currents of lava and threw clouds of ashes over the site of the imperial city. It is common in northern and southern Germany, but it has not been found in Europe north of a line passing through Hamburg, or in any part of Scandinavia or Finland. It occurs in the auriferous gravels of the Urals; and in Siberia, as is well known, it formerly existed in countless herds, being buried in the morasses in large numbers, in the same manner as the Irish elks at the bottom of the Irish peat-bogs. The admirable preservation of some of the carcases is undoubtedly due to their having been entombed directly after death, and then quickly frozen up, a process which need not necessarily imply climatal conditions unlike those of the present time in Siberia. In unusually hot spring times, the warm waters borne down by the great rivers from their southern feeders thaw the frozen morasses with incredible rapidity, so that the hard ice- bound "tundra" becomes quickly converted into a treacherous bog. In the exceptionally warm season of 1846, the mammoth discovered by Lieut. Benkendorf on the banks of the Indigirka was thawed out of the tundra until it was revealed to the astonished eyes of the beholder, standing on its feet in the position in which it had been bogged. Had any elks or reindeer been on