and carry away large portions of their banks, and expose the bones previously buried in the earth; again, many others are found in excavating for wells and the foundations of buildings. There is no ground for adopting the hypothesis of Patrin, that these bones are brought by the rivers from the mountains of India, where elephants exist in a state of nature at the present day. Moreover, the bones are no less abundant on the banks of the Volga, Don and Ja'ik, which run from the north; and of the Lena, Indigirska, Kolima and Anadir (which flow from the very cold mountains of Chinese Tartary, where assuredly no elephants exist), than in the Ob or the Jenissea, and its tributary streams; of which the Irtisch is the only one that approaches sufficiently near to the mountains of Thibet, to allow the application of the hypothesis with any show of probability. They also exist in the peninsula of Kamschatka, which they could not reach from India without making an extraordinary circuit.
Pallas tells us that there is no river or stream in all Asiatic Russia, from the Don to the promontory of Tchutchis, on the banks or in the bed of which the bones of elephants, and other animals foreign to the climate, are not to be found; and this, he observes, is more particularly the case with the rivers of the plains. These bones are found in all latitudes, but the best ivory comes from the north, on account of its being less exposed to the action of the elements.
In answer to the hypothesis that these bones could result from human expeditions (such, for instance, as that under Annibal, by which many elephants were brought into Italy and never returned), their immense numbers may be adduced as quite conclusive. Moreover, in many places in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere, the bones are invariably intermixed with those of other wild beasts of all sizes. The bones are generally dispersed, and in but very few places have entire skeletons been found, preserved as it were in sepulchres of sand. Pallas seems to have overlooked one important fact, namely, that in certain places skeletons of mammoths have been found, with portions of the flesh and other soft parts still attached to them. It is the universal opinion throughout Siberia, that mammoths have been found with the flesh quite fresh and filled with blood; this, although an exaggeration, is founded on the fact that entire bodies have been discovered, preserved in ice, with the flesh comparatively in a state of freshness. Isbrand Ides speaks of a head, on which the flesh was decaying, and of a frozen leg, as large as the body of a man: and Jean Bernhard Muller mentions a tusk, the cavity of which was filled with a substance resembling coagulated blood.
