be seen, and the blanket was confined to the bed.  In fact, the Indians and half-breeds of Athabasca Lake did not seem to differ in any way from those of the Middle and Upper Peace River, save that the former were all hunters and fishermen, pure and simple, there being little or no agriculture.  It was impossible to study the manners and customs of the aborigines, since we had no time to observe them closely.  They have their legends and traditions and remnants of ceremonies, much of which is upon record, and they cherish, especially, some very curious beliefs.  One, in particular, we were told, obtained amongst them, namely, that the mastodon still exists in the fastnesses of the Upper Mackenzie.  They describe it as a monster many times larger than the buffalo, and they dread going into the parts it is supposed to haunt.  This singular opinion may be the survival of a very old tradition regarding that animal, but is more likely due to the presence of its remains in the shape of tusks and bones found here and there throughout the Mackenzie River district and the Yukon.

[A similar belief, it is said, exists amongst the Indians of the Yukon.  The remains of the primeval elephant are exceedingly abundant in the tundras of Siberia, and a considerable trade in mammoth ivory has been carried on between that region and England for many years.  It is supposed that the Asian elephant advanced far to the North during the interglacial period and perished in the recurrent glacial epoch.  Its American congener, the mastodon, found its way from Asia to this continent during the Drift period, when, it is believed, land communication existed in what is now Bering’s Strait, and perished in a like manner.  It was not a sudden but a gradual extinction in their native habitats, due to natural causes, such as encroaching ice and other material changes in the animals’ environment.  This, I believe, is the accepted scientific opinion of to-day.  But the fact that these animals are at times exposed entire by the falling away of ice-cliffs or ledges, their flesh being quite fresh and fit food for dogs, and even men, opens up a very interesting field of inquiry and conjecture.  In the bowels of a mammoth recently revealed in North-Eastern Siberia vegetable food was found, probably tropical, at all events unknown to the botany of to-day.  The foregoing facts seem to be at variance with the doctrine of Uniformity, or with anything like a slow process.  The entombment of these animals must have been very sudden, and due, one would naturally think, to a tremendous cataclysm followed by immediate freezing, else their flesh would have become tainted.  A recent English writer predicts another deluge owing to the constant accumulation of ice at the Antarctic Pole, which for untold ages has been attracting and freezing the waters of the Northern Hemisphere.  A lowering process, he says, has thus been going on in the ocean levels to the north through immeasurable time, its record being the