, a common measure of distance is the
time that it takes to smoke a pipe. In this part of Siberia, they take
as their unit the time necessary for boiling a kettle of a particular
sort of food. They tell you, that such and such a place is so many
kettles off, or half a kettle, or, as the case may be, only part of a
kettle.

At last they arrive at the Lena. This is described as one of the
grandest rivers in the world. At a distance of thirteen hundred versts
from the sea, (three versts are equal to two miles,) it is from five to
six miles wide. Its entire length is not less than four thousand versts.
The word Lena implies lazy--a name justified by the circuitous flowing
of its stream. At Yakutsk, the seat of the Governor, they were received
with great civility in this capital of the province, latitude sixty-two
north, and longitude one hundred and thirty east. The extreme
temperature of summer and winter is almost beyond belief, the
thermometer having, risen in the shade to 106 deg. of Fahrenheit, and in
winter having fallen to 83 deg. below zero--making a difference of 189
deg. In this district are the enormous deposits of mammoth bones. Spring
after spring, the alluvial banks of the lakes and rivers crumbling under
the thaw have given up their dead; and the islands opposite to the mouth
of the Yana, and, as there was reason for believing, even the bed of the
ocean itself, teems with those mysterious memorials of antiquity. The
question is, how do those bones come there? Sir George, after giving the
opinions of some of the professors of geology, conceives the most
natural account of the phenomenon to be, that those animals or their
bones were swept from the great Tartarian pasturages of Cobi, by the
waters of the Deluge, towards the ocean. We must acknowledge that this
has long been our own opinion. It must be remembered that the Scriptural
account states the rising of the Deluge to have been gradual. The rain
fell forty days and nights. All living things would of course make their
way to the heights to escape the rising inundation of the valleys. The
cattle thus grouped together in immense herds, (the buffalos in the
prairies at the present day sometimes exceed five thousand in one
pasturage,) thus gathered into one mass, would be finally submerged, and
swept away in whatever irresistible current rushed over the spot on
which they stood. The frost of the region, which penetrates the earth to
the depth apparently of som