ieth degrees of
north latitude, and the eighty-sixth and ninetieth of east longitude. This
region has exactly the climate described,--ten months of winter and two of
summer. The same is true of Western Thibet and most of Central Siberia.
Malte-Brun says: "The winter is nine or ten months long through almost the
whole of Siberia." June and July are the only months wholly free from
snow. On the parallel of 60 deg., the earth on the 28th of June was found
frozen, at a depth of three feet.

But is there reason to think that the climate was ever different?
Geologists assure us that "great oscillations of climate have occurred in
times immediately antecedent to the peopling of the earth by man."[136]
But in Central and Northern Asia there is evidence of such fluctuations of
temperature in a much more recent period. In 1803, on the banks of the
Lena, in latitude 70 deg., the entire body of a mammoth fell from a mass of
ice in which it had been entombed perhaps for thousands of years, but with
the flesh so perfectly preserved that it was immediately devoured by
wolves. Since then these frozen elephants have been found in great
numbers, in so perfect a condition that the bulb of an eye of one of them
is in the Museum at Moscow.[137] They have been found as far north as 75 deg..
Hence Lyell thinks it "reasonable to believe that a large region in
Central Asia, including perhaps the southern half of Siberia, enjoyed at
no very remote period in the earth's history a temperate climate,
sufficiently mild to afford food for numerous herds of elephants and
rhinoceroses."

Amid these terrible convulsions of the air and ground, these antagonisms
of outward good and evil, Zoroaster developed his belief in the dualism of
all things. To his mind, as to that of the Hebrew poet, God had placed all
things against each other, two and two. No Pantheistic optimism, like that
of India, could satisfy his thought. He could not say, "Whatever is, is
right"; some things seemed fatally wrong. The world was a scene of war,
not of peace and rest. Life to the good man was not sleep, but battle. If
there was a good God over all, as he devoutly believed, there was also a
spirit of evil, of awful power, to whom we were not to yield, but with
whom we should do battle. In the far distance he saw the triumph of good;
but that triumph could only come by fighting the good fight now. But his
weapons were not carnal. "Pure thoughts" going out into "true words" and