But by what means can we account for the carcase of a rhinoceros being buried in the earth, on the confines of the polar circle? Shall we ascribe it to some immense torrent, which, sweeping across the deserts of Tartary, and the mountains of Altai, transported the productions of India to the plains of Siberia, and interred in the mud of the Lena the animals that had fed on the banks of the Barampooter or the Ganges? Were all other objections to so extraordinary a supposition removed, the preservation of the hide and muscles of a dead animal, and the adhesion of the parts, while it was dragged for 2000 miles over some of the highest and most rugged mountains in the world, is too absurd to be for a moment admitted. Or shall we suppose that this carcase has been floated in by an inundation of the sea, from some tropical country now swallowed up, and of which the numerous islands of the Indian Archipelago are the remains? The heat of a tropical climate, and the putrescence naturally arising from it, would soon, independently of all other accidents, have stripped the bones of their covering. Indeed this _instantia singularis_, as in every sense it may properly be called, seems calculated for the express purpose of excluding every hypothesis but one from being employed to explain the origin of fossil bones. It not only excludes the two which have just been mentioned, but it excludes also that of Buffon, viz. that these bones are the remains of animals which lived in Siberia, when the arctic regions enjoyed a fine climate, and a temperature like that which southern Asia now possesses. From the preservation of the flesh and hide of this rhinoceros, it is plain, that when the body was buried in the earth, the climate was much the same that it is now, and the cold sufficient to resist the progress of putrefaction. Pallas takes notice of the inconsistency of the state of this skeleton, with the hypothesis of Buffon; but he does not observe that the inconsistency is equally great between it and his own hypothesis, the importation of the fossil bones by an inundation of the sea, and that flesh or muscle must have been entirely consumed long before it could be carried by the waves to the parallel of 64°, from any climate which the rhinoceros at present inhabits.