snowstorm, they slipped into a crevice in the ice-cliff, were snowed up instantly, and thus preserved by the antiseptic power of frost to this age? The glaciers of the north may hold multitudes more of these and kindred creatures, some of which may yet be disinterred, or thawed out, and may lift yet more the curtain which so tantalisingly covers the conditions of their life-history. These two huge Pachyderms are certainly extinct now; yet their remains, scattered over so vast an area, are everywhere associated with those of other animals which were indubitably contemporary with them, and whose species-life is continued to our own times. Some of these, as the great bear and the musk-ox of the sub-polar regions, we know to be in the habit of migrating northward in spring, and southward in autumn. That no lack of suitable food would be found, even in such high latitudes, for browsing quadrupeds, appears from the fact that, even beyond the parallel of 75° north, large birch-trees are found embedded in the cliffs, in abundance sufficient to be largely used as common fuel, and still retaining their woody fibre, their bark, branches, and roots. The climate then was not greatly different from what it is now, when the birch, as a tree, reaches to about 70°.

It is interesting to observe that both this elephant and this rhinoceros were inhabitants of England also; and that at the same period as the cavern bear, the hyena, the lion, and the machairode, the baboon, the bison, and the urus, the Irish elk, and the extinct horse; at the same time too, as the rein-deer, the stag, the black bear, the wolf and fox, the beaver, the wild cat, the hare, and rabbit, the otter and badger, the wild hog, the rat and mouse, all our present shrews, the mole, the stoat and polecat, the noctule and the horse-shoe bats. And curious it is to note, as we go over this list, how some of the creatures enumerated are long extinct everywhere, some have been long extinct in England, but are still found elsewhere, some have more recently become extinct here, but at different eras, some are nearly extinguished, and some are yet abundant in different degrees.

I do not attach much importance to the traditions of the Siberians, that the tusks and skeletons which they find belonged to a large subterraneous animal, which could not bear the light; nor to those of the Chinese, respecting a similar burrowing quadruped of prodigious bulk, which they call, by a sort of irony, tyn-schu, or the mouse that hides himself. The fables may have easily been formed from the observation of the fossil bones, and do not necessarily imply any memory of the living original.

The two examples of the exhumation of Pachydermata in a fresh state, which I have given in detail, are by no means the only cases that have occurred. It is the universally-received belief throughout Siberia, that Mammoths have been found with the flesh quite fresh and filled with blood; probably meaning that the animal juices flowed when thawed. Isbrand Ides mentions a head on which the flesh, in a decaying state, was present; and a frozen leg, as large as the body of a man; and Jean Bernhard Müller speaks of a tusk, the cavity of which was filled with a substance which resembled coagulated blood.

Again, in the voyage of Sarytschew, particulars are given of the discovery of a Mammoth on the banks of the Alaseia, a river which flows into the Arctic Ocean, beyond the Indigirska. It had been dislodged by a flood, and somewhat injured; but the carcase was still almost entire, and was covered with the skin, to which in some places long hair remained attached.

These statements might reasonably have been esteemed either fables or gross exaggerations, but for the subsequent discovery of the rhinoceros and elephant whose remains have been brought to Europe. Read in the light of these accounts, the earlier stories take the dignity of authentic history; and it is interesting to note how well these details agree with those observed by the accurate Adams;—the long hair, for example, with which the Alaseia carcase was clothed being the very counterpart of that upon the Lena elephant; though à priori we should have looked for a very different condition in the integument of these huge Pachyderms.

If we look now at the great Mastodon, that elephantine beast, which with a stature equal to that of the tallest African elephant combined a much greater length of body and bulk of limb, we shall see some reason for concluding that the period of its decease is not indefinitely removed from our own era. Its remains occur in greatest abundance in North America; and it is interesting to observe that among several of the aboriginal tribes of Red men there were extant traditions of the Mastodon as a living creature. Dim, vague, and distorted these traditions are; but so far from our rejecting them in toto on that account, we ought rather to consider these characters as evidence of their antiquity. When semi-savage nations present us with orally-preserved accounts of very remote objects or actions, we look, as a matter of course, for a considerable element of the wild, and extravagant, and absurd in them. If we found nothing but what was reasonable, and consistent, and intelligible, we should say in a moment, this account cannot have been transmitted very far. The question, in the case before us, is not, we must remember, the precise habits and instincts of the Mastodon, but whether the Indians knew anything at all of the Mastodon having ever been a living animal. Now, as I have observed, they had. M. Fabri, a French officer who had served in Canada, informed Buffon that the Red men spoke of the great bones which lay scattered in various parts of that region as having belonged to an animal which, after their oriental style, they named Le Père aux Bœufs. The Shawnee Indians believed that with these enormous animals there existed men of proportionate development, and that the Great Being destroyed both with thunderbolts. Those of Virginia stated that, as a troop of these terrible quadrupeds were destroying the deer, the bisons, and the other animals created for the use of the Indians, the Great Man slew them all with His thunder, except the big bull, who, nothing daunted, presented his enormous forehead to the bolts, and shook them off as they fell, till, being at last wounded in the side, he fled towards the great lakes, where he is to this day.

Evidence of the comparatively-recent entombment of these remains exists, however, of another character. They do not in general appear to have been rolled, but to have lived where they are now found; in some instances, as along the Great Osage River, being imbedded in a vertical position, as if the animals had been suddenly bogged in the swampy soil. Nor is there any great accumulation of earth upon them generally. All along the edges of that great saline morass called, from the abundance of these animal relics, Big Bone Lick, and on the borders, the skeletons are found sunk in the soft earth, many of them not more than a yard or two below the surface, and some even scarcely covered. With them are found in large numbers the bones of the existing bison, the wapiti-stag, and other herbivores, which still throng to the same place, for the same reasons, and meet the same fate.

Comparative anatomy determines, from the structure of the bones of the head in the Mastodon, that it must have carried a proboscis like that of the elephant. This, though wholly fleshy, has left traces of its existence. Barton reports that, in 1762, out of five skeletons which were seen by the natives, one skull still possessed what they described as a "long nose" with the mouth under it. And Kalm, in speaking of a skeleton, discovered by the Indians