Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 February 1910 — A WORLD MYSTERY. [ARTICLE]

A WORLD MYSTERY.

fik* Presence of Bones of fropiul • Animals In the Arctic*. Islands of ivofy hidden among the Arctic Ice lying north of Siberia were described In a paper read, by Dr. .Gath Whitley at the Victoria Institute the other day. These islands were discovered by Russian explorers at the end of the eighteenth .century, and have been exploited by traders in fossil ivory ever since. As recently as 1898 about - 80,000 pounds of fossil ivory was offered for sale at the fair at Yakutsk. To the earlier explorers it seemed that one islet known as Llakoff’s island was “actually composed of the bones and tusks of elephants, cemented together by icy sand. The horns of buffaloes, or rather of musk oxen, andj rhinoceroses were also wonderfully abundant. The sandy shores ana slopes were full of mammoths’ tusks. In 1886 a German, Dr. Bunge, explored Llakoff’s island. ’’The sand and gravel,” said the lecturer, “were found to rest in blocks of ice and the alluvial beds were full of the bones oi mammoths, rhinoceroses and musk oxen”—this after hundreds of years of visits from ivory hunters. Trawling showed that the bottom of the sea near the islands was strewn with tusks and bones. 1 These extraordinary discoveries are explained by the following theory: In prehistoric times Siberia enjoyed a comparatively mild climate and a great tract of country now under ice stood at a considerable level above the sea. Vast herds of mammoths, rhinoceroses and buffaloes roamed over these plains. A great catastrophe at last overtook them. The land subsided, the sea rose and the animals congregated in great numbers on the mountain tops. Even these were at last submerged, and the destruction was complete. After a time the waters subsided slowly and the islands which had formed mountains in the land rose above the sea. Why the climate changed after these upheavals is still a problem to be solved.—New York Sun. —-- ’ i—’ 1 - -