The long summer was over. For ages a tropical climate had prevailed over a great part of the earth, and animals whose home is now beneath the equator roamed over the world from the far south to the very borders of the Arctics. The gigantic quadrupeds, the mastodons, elephants, tigers, lions, hyenas, bears, whose remains are found in Europe from its southern promontories to the northernmost limits of Siberia and Scandinavia, and in America from the Southern States to Greenland and the Melville Islands, may indeed be said to have possessed the earth in those days. But their reign was over. A sudden intense winter, that was also to last for ages, fell upon our globe; it spread over the very countries where these tropical animals had their homes, and so suddenly did it come upon them that they were embalmed beneath masses of snow and ice, without time even for the decay which follows death. The elephant was by no means a solitary specimen; upon further investigation it was found that the disinterment of these large tropical animals in Northern Russia and Asia was no unusual occurrence. Indeed, their frequent discoveries of this kind had given rise among the ignorant inhabitants to the singular superstition that gigantic moles lived under the earth which crumbled away and turned to dust as soon as they came to the upper air. This tradition, no doubt, arose from the fact that, when in digging they came upon the bodies of these animals, they often found them perfectly preserved under the frozen ground, but the moment they were exposed to heat and light they decayed and fell to pieces at once. Admiral Wrangell, whose Arctic explorations have been so valuable to science, tells us that the remains of these animals are heaped up in such quantities in certain parts of Siberia that he and his men climbed over ridges and mounds consisting entirely of the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, etc.