of the extraordinary events which he has
chronicled, after years of the most arduous labour and under conditions
of peculiar hardship. And though his work cannot be over-estimated, and
his opinions should receive the most careful consideration, yet I fear
the explanation will not be looked upon as entirely satisfactory. Every
one will agree with him that the climate of Siberia must have been
greatly moister in pliocene and pleistocene times than it is now. The
Aralo-Caspian covered a vast area of South-western Siberia. Freshwater
basins existed along the east of the Ural Mountains, while Central Asia
was studded over with a number of large lakes, which have now almost
entirely vanished. But that the generally assumed refrigeration of
Europe must have had a chilling effect on the Siberian atmosphere seems
to me evident. That the whole of Northern Europe should have been made
uninhabitable owing to the advance of the Scandinavian ice-sheet, while
North Siberia at the same time supported forests, meadows, and a
temperate fauna, is incredible. At the approach of winter, at any rate,
the animals would have been driven southward for thousands of miles to
seek shelter from the snows and cold and to obtain nourishment, and it
would scarcely have been possible for them to undertake such vast
migrations at every season. Professor James Geikie's suggestion (p.
706), that the Mammoth and Woolly Rhinoceros could have survived the
Pleistocene Epoch in Southern Siberia, does not appear to solve the
problem, as that part of Asia must have participated in the great cold
which is said to have prevailed all over Europe.

Let us now concede, for the sake of argument, that the current views
regarding the pleistocene climate of Europe are correct. We are told by
Professor Geikie that the climate of Scotland during part of the
Pleistocene Epoch was so cold, that the whole country was buried
underneath one immense _mer de glace_, through which peered only the
higher mountain-tops (p. 67). If this was the state of climate in close
proximity to the Atlantic, it must probably have been still more severe
on the European continent. Now at the present time Siberia has the
reputation of being the coldest country in the world, and the mercury of
the thermometer is said to remain frozen for weeks during winter, even
in the south.

With the prevailing dampness in pleistocene times the snowfall
throughout Siberia would have been much heavier than at pre