n Siberia vegetable food
was found, probably tropical, at all events unknown to the botany of
to-day. The foregoing facts seem to be at variance with the doctrine
of Uniformity, or with anything like a slow process. The entombment
of these animals must have been very sudden, and due, one would
naturally think, to a tremendous cataclysm followed by immediate
freezing, else their flesh would have become tainted. A recent
English writer predicts another deluge owing to the constant
accumulation of ice at the Antarctic Pole, which for untold ages has
been attracting and freezing the waters of the Northern Hemisphere.
A lowering process, he says, has thus been going on in the ocean
levels to the north through immeasurable time, its record being the
ancient water-marks now high up on the mountain sides of British
Columbia and elsewhere. It is certainly not unthinkable that, if
subject to such a displacement of its centre of gravity, our planet
at some inconceivably remote period capsized, so that what were
before the Tropics became the Poles, and that such a catastrophe is
not only possible but is certain to happen again. As a conjecture it
may be unscientific; but how many of the accepted theories of science
have ceased to be! As a matter of fact, she has been very busy
burying her dead, particularly of late years, and her theory of the
extinction of the primeval elephant may yet prove to be one of them.]

On the 9th the steamer _Grahame_ arrived from Smith's Landing,
bringing with her about 120 baffled Klondikers, returning to
the United States, there being still some sixty more, they
said, down the Mackenzie River, who intended to make their
way out, if possible, before winter. They had a solitary woman
with them who had discarded a duffer husband, and who looked
very self-reliant, indeed, being girt about with bowie-knife
and revolver, but otherwise not alarming.

It was certainly a motley crowd, and some of its members by no
means honest. Chief-factor Camsell, who had just come from Fort
Simpson, told me they had stolen from every house where they had
a chance, and mentioned, amongst other things, a particularly
ungrateful theft of a whip-saw from a native's cabin shortly
after an Indian had, with much pains, overtaken them with a similar
one, which they had lost on the trail. Their departure, therefore,
was not lamented, and the natives were glad to get rid of them.

We ourselves boarded the steamer for Fort McMurra