the Vendidad appears the affectionate recollection of these emigrant races for their fatherland in Central Asia, and the Zoroasterian faith in a creative and protective Providence. The awful convulsion which turned their summer climate into the present Siberian winter of ten months' duration was part of a divine plan. Old Iran would have been too attractive, and all mankind would have crowded into that Eden. So the evil Ahriman was permitted to glide into it, a new serpent of destruction, and its seven months of summer and five of winter were changed to ten of winter and two of summer.[135] This Aryana-Vaêjo, Old Iran, the primeval seat of the great Indo-European race, is supposed by Haug and Bunsen to be situated on the high plains northeast of Samarcand, between the thirty-seventh and fortieth degrees of north latitude, and the eighty-sixth and ninetieth of east longitude. This region has exactly the climate described,--ten months of winter and two of summer. The same is true of Western Thibet and most of Central Siberia. Malte-Brun says: "The winter is nine or ten months long through almost the whole of Siberia." June and July are the only months wholly free from snow. On the parallel of 60°, the earth on the 28th of June was found frozen, at a depth of three feet. But is there reason to think that the climate was ever different? Geologists assure us that "great oscillations of climate have occurred in times immediately antecedent to the peopling of the earth by man."[136] But in Central and Northern Asia there is evidence of such fluctuations of temperature in a much more recent period. In 1803, on the banks of the Lena, in latitude 70°, the entire body of a mammoth fell from a mass of ice in which it had been entombed perhaps for thousands of years, but with the flesh so perfectly preserved that it was immediately devoured by wolves. Since then these frozen elephants have been found in great numbers, in so perfect a condition that the bulb of an eye of one of them is in the Museum at Moscow.[137] They have been found as far north as 75°. Hence Lyell thinks it "reasonable to believe that a large region in Central Asia, including perhaps the southern half of Siberia, enjoyed at no very remote period in the earth's history a temperate climate, sufficiently mild to afford food for numerous herds of elephants and rhinoceroses."