Much may be learned from this highly interesting account; it contains the key to several questions which otherwise might have remained unsolved. Let us see what conclusions can be derived therefrom. _First_, its position and perfect state of preservation are sufficient to prove that it was buried where it died. It sank in a marsh, probably during the summer. Then came the cold of winter; the carcase, together with the ground around it, was frozen so that decomposition was arrested, and frozen it must have remained for many centuries till the day when M. Benkendorf came across it. Or it may have been buried up in a snow-drift which in time became ice. In the region where frozen Mammoths occur (and there are at least nine cases on record), a considerable thickness of frozen soil may be found at all seasons of the year; so that if a carcase be once embedded in mud or ice, its putrefaction may be arrested for indefinite ages. According to one authority, the ground is now permanently frozen even to the depth of four hundred feet at the town of Jakutsh, on the western bank of the river Lena. Throughout a large part of Siberia the boundary cliffs of the lakes and rivers consist of earthy materials and ice in horizontal layers. Middendorf bored to the depth of seventy feet, and after passing through much frozen soil mixed with ice, came down upon a solid mass of pure transparent ice, the depth of which he was unable to ascertain. The year 1846, when M. Benkendorf saw his Mammoth, was exceptional on account of its unusually warm summer, so that the ground of the tundra region thawed, and was converted into a morass. Had any Mammoths been alive then, and strayed beyond the limits of the woods into the tundra, probably some of them would have been likewise engulphed, and, when once covered up and protected from the decaying action of the air, the cold of the next winter would have frozen their carcases as this one must have been frozen up. Truly, "there is nothing new under the sun," and the present highly useful method of freezing meat and bringing it over from America or New Zealand to add to our insufficient home supplies, is but a resort to a process employed by Nature long before the age of steamships, and perhaps even before the appearance of man on the earth! _Secondly_, with regard to the food of the Mammoth, Benkendorf's discovery is of great service in solving the question how such a creature could have maintained its existence in so inhospitable and unpromising a country. The presence of fir-spikes in the stomach is sufficient to prove that it fed on vegetation such as is now found at the northern part of the woods as they join the low treeless tundra in which the body lay buried.