g. 1.

_Map showing the course of the Siberian rivers from south to north, from
temperate to arctic regions, in the country where the fossil bones of
the Mammoth abound._]

As to the position of the bones, Pallas found them in some places
imbedded together with marine remains; in others, simply with fossil
wood, or lignite, such as, he says, might have been derived from
carbonized peat. On the banks of the Yenesei, below the city of
Krasnojarsk, in lat. 56 degrees, 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 neighboring country were there any
marine shells, but merely layers of black coal.[139] But grinders of the
mammoth were collected much farther down the same river, near the sea,
in lat. 70 degrees, mixed with _marine_ petrifactions.[140] 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_). 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
have been found in the most wonderful state of preservation. In 1772,
Pallas obtained from Wiljuiskoi, in lat. 64 degrees, 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 was compared to a
natural mummy, and emitted an odor like putrid flesh, part of the skin
being still covered with black and gray hairs. So great, indeed, was the
quantity of hair on the foot and head conveyed to St. Petersburg, that
Pallas asked whether the rhinoceros of the Lena might not have been an
inhabitant of the temperate regions of middle Asia, its clothing being
so much warmer than that of the African rhinoceros.[141]

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