of southeast Russia and southwest Siberia, regions which, like the tundras, are much exposed to wind action. The general character and distribution of the löss prove its æolian origin, and its organic contents are quite in keeping. We may be sure, then, that dry steppe conditions formerly prevailed throughout central Europe, and that in those regions dust storms and snowstorms must have been of common occurrence. We have seen how, in existing tundras and steppes, the semidomesticated and wild animals of those regions are now and again overwhelmed in storms and smothered in snow. Now, similar catastrophes must have happened again and again in the tundras and steppes of prehistoric times. And we are not left in this matter to mere conjecture, for the carcasses of some of the more notable animals of those days, now extinct, have been preserved to the present in the frozen snows—the famous ice formations of northern Siberia. So perfectly preserved, indeed, was the mammoth discovered by Mr. Adams that its flesh was devoured by wolves and bears, and from the appearances presented by it and others we can not doubt that the animals had perished in snowdrifts. Brandt records, for example, that the congested veins and capillary vessels in the head of a rhinoceros examined by him were charged with coagulated blood, as if the animal had died of suffocation; and Schrenck says of another described by him, that the distended nostrils and gaping mouth were highly suggestive of a similar death. It is probable that these animals were summer visitors to the tundras, overtaken by autumnal snowstorms. If perfectly preserved carcasses are rare, such is not the case with skeletal remains. In many places throughout Siberia the bones of various mammals occur in enormous quantities, huddled together, as it were, in very limited spots. It seems impossible to account for such hecatombs on any other supposition than that they are the silent records of great blizzards and snowtorms. Even in our own time herds of wild reindeer, with their young, are overcome by snowstorms in the tundras, while in North America great flocks of sheep and cattle frequently perish in the same way. Professor Garman, who draws attention to the disastrous results of blizzards in the great prairie lands of that region, is of opinion that the extraordinary heaps of skulls and other remains of the bison that are met with here and there in northern Colorado and Wyoming, are the remains of herds which have been suffocated in snowdrifts.
It is not necessary to suppose that all the relics and remains of the mammoth and its congeners in Siberia are evidence of the destructive effect of blizzards. The animals doubtless met their death under many different circumstances. Sometimes they would appear to have been bogged in swampy holes and morasses. I have referred to the peculiar ice formations of the arctic coast lands. These are sheets of ice of unknown thickness, preserved under more or less thick accumulations of earthy and loamy materials. The ice is believed to represent the blown or drifted snows of prehistoric times, which here and there have
