Its fauna comprises the white bear, reindeer, Arctic fox, glutton, some small rodents, and numerous species of birds. Here the hunters also find the remains of extinct animals, mammoth and rhinoceros ivory, buffalo horns, horse hoofs, and Hedenström picked up an axe made of a mammoth's tusk. The beach is strewn with the stems of the larch and poplar stranded by the waves, but the great curiosity of the island is a row of hills fringing the south coast for a distance of over 3 miles, whose sandstone and gravel formations contain considerable masses of carbonised timber, referred by some to the Jurassic epoch, but regarded by others merely as drift-wood of recent date. Although these "Wood Hills" are only from 100 to 200 feet above sea-level, the mirage sometimes renders them visible from the Siberian coast, 168 miles off.
During his numerous exploring expeditions east of New Siberia, Wrangell had his mind steadily fixed on a northern land of which the natives had spoken, and towards which he saw the birds of passage directing their flight. A chart also, preserved amongst the foreign archives of Moscow, figured an island in these northern latitudes. During his three trips across the Siberian ice he was arrested by a polînia or "clearing," such as all other Arctic navigators have found, and which have caused the name of Polynia to be given to the open sea met by Hayes in the American polar seas north of Smith Sound. The ice at the edge of the polînia was too weak to carry sleighs farther north, and the sea was distinctly felt surging in long billows underneath. Wrangell's explorations only ended in a negative result, or in the conclusion that the sought-for land could have no existence. Nevertheless it has been found in the very place where its outlines had been drawn by Wrangell on the reports of the natives. The large island, which has been named "Wrangell Land" in posthumous honour of the illustrious navigator, rises high above the water to the north of the Chukchi country, near the northern entrance to Bering Strait. Discovered for the first time by Kellett in 1849, and sighted by the whale fisher Long in 1867, this land is still only faintly traced on the charts. How far it may stretch northwards is still undetermined, nor is it known whether it forms part of the land again seen by Kellett in 1867. Mount Long, at its southernmost extremity, has an elevation of 2,500 feet, and its regular conic form has caused it to be classed with the extinct volcanoes. Nordenskjöld and Palander were prevented by the ice from visiting these islands.
The whole space stretching north of New Siberia and Wrangell Land, and between Franz-Joseph Land and the American polar archipelagos, remains to be explored, nor is it yet known whether it is partly occupied by any northern extension of Greenland, as Petermann supposed, or whether these waters encircle islands or archipelagos alone. In any case no erratic boulders are found on the northern seaboard of Siberia, from which Nordenskjöld concludes that there are no extensive lands in the Siberian polar seas, or rather that the icebergs carry scarcely any rocky detritus with them, as indeed has hitherto been admitted by most geographers. North-west of the Taimir Peninsula the Norwegian navigator Johannsen discovered, in 1878, an island to which he gave the fully justified name of Ensomheden, or "Lone Land." This dreary ice-bound land has an area of about 80 square miles, terminating westwards with high cliffs, above which rises a peak 510 feet high. The sands of the low-lying east shore are strewn with drift-wood stranded here by the current. This island was probably sighted by Laptyev in 1741.
