t youths in some
villages in Sweden. For Lieut. Hooper, who during the winter 1848-9
made a journey in dog-sledges from Chukotskoj-nos along the coast
towards Behring's Straits says that the inhabitants at Cape Deschnev
itself enjoyed the same bad reputation among their Namollo
neighbours to the south as among the Chukches living to the
westward. "They spoke another language." Possibly they were pure
Eskimo. ]
[Footnote 345: There is still in existence a sketch of a tribe,
living far to the south on the coast of the Indian Sea, who at the
time of Alexander the Great used the bones of the whale in a similar
way. "They build their houses so that the richest among them take
bones of the whale, which the sea casts up, and use them as beams,
of the larger bones they make their doors." Arrian, _Historia
Indica_, XXIX. and XXX. ]
[Footnote 346: These strata were discovered during Kotzebue's
cucumnavigation of the globe (_Entdeckungs Reise_, Weimar, 1821, i.
p. 146, and ii. p. 170). The strand-bank was covered by an
exceedingly luxuriant vegetable carpet, and rose to a height of
eighty feet above the sea. Here the "rock," if this word can be used
for a stratum of ice, was found to consist of pure ice, covered with
a layer, only six inches thick, of blue clay and turf-earth. The ice
must have been several hundred thousand years old, for on its being
melted a large number of bones and tusks of the mammoth appeared,
from which we may draw the conclusion that the ice-stratum was
formed during the period in which the mammoth lived in these
regions. This remarkable observation has been to a certain extent
disputed by later travellers, but its correctness has recently been
fully confirmed by Dall. On the other hand, the extent to which the
strong odour, which was observed at the place and resembled that of
burned horns, arose from the decaying mammoth remains, is perhaps
uncertain. Kotzebue fixed the latitude of the place at 66 deg. 15'
36". During Beechey's voyage in 1827 the place was thoroughly
examined by Mr. Collie, the medical officer of the expedition. He
brought home thence a large number of the bones of the mammoth, ox,
musk-ox, reindeer, and horse, which were described by the famous
geologist Buckland (F.W. Beechey, _Narrative of a Voyage to the
Pacific and Behring's Straits, 1825-28_. London, 1831, ii.
Appendix). ]
[Footnote 347: _Further Papers relative to the recent Arctic
Expedition, etc._ Presented to both Hous
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