The most recent discoveries made in 1843 by Mr. Middendorf, a distinguished Russian naturalist, and which he communicated to me in September, 1846, afford more precise information as to the climate of the Siberian lowlands, at the period when the extinct quadrupeds were entombed. One elephant was found on the Tas, between the Obi and Yenesei, near the arctic circle, about lat. 66° 30' N., with some parts of the flesh in so perfect a state that the bulb of the eye is now preserved in the museum at Moscow. Another carcass, together with a young individual of the same species, was met with in the same year, 1843, in lat. 75° 15' N., near the river Taimyr, with the flesh decayed. It was imbedded in strata of clay and sand, with erratic blocks, at about 15 feet above the level of the sea. In the same deposit Mr. Middendorf observed the trunk of a larch tree (_Pinus larix_), the same wood as that now carried down in abundance by the Taimyr to the Arctic Sea. There were also associated fossil shells of _living northern_ species, and which are moreover characteristic of the drift or _glacial_ deposits of Europe. Among these _Nucula pygmæa_, _Tellina calcarea_, _Mya truncata_, and _Saxicava rugosa_ were conspicuous. So fresh is the ivory throughout northern Russia, that, according to Tilesius, thousands of fossil tusks have been collected and used in turning; yet others are still procured and sold in great plenty. He declares his belief that the bones still left in northern Russia must greatly exceed in number all the elephants now living on the globe. We are as yet ignorant of the entire geographical range of the mammoth; but its remains have been recently collected from the cliffs of frozen mud and ice on the east side of Behring's Straits, in Eschscholtz's Bay, in Russian America, lat. 66° N. As the cliffs waste away by the thawing of the ice, tusks and bones fall out, and a strong odor of animal matter is exhaled from the mud.[145]