toward grazing grounds in the north in summer, and southward in winter.

The long shaggy hair with which it was clothed, distinguishing it in appearance from the modern elephant and its smaller contemporary, the mastodon, was composed of three distinct suits: the longest, rough, black bristles, about eighteen inches in length; the next, a coat of finer close-set hair, fawn-colored, from nine to ten inches long; and the last, a soft, reddish wool, about five inches long, filling up the interstices between the other hair, and enabling the animal to withstand an arctic cold.

The enormous tusks measured along the curve from eleven to fifteen feet, and curved quite abruptly outward and backward.

The massive grinder, sometimes weighing seventeen pounds, was a conspicuous characteristic; the whole of its surface was not brought into use at once, but successively, new grinding-points being formed from behind as the outer and older points wore away.

Several etymologies have been given for the name "mammoth"; among others, the word "behemoth" in the Book of Job, and the Arabic word "mehemot," signifying an elephant of very large size. One of the most interesting is the Tartar word "mamma," meaning the earth, suggested by Pallas, a Russian scientist, who first gave a description of the animal. "The Tungooses and Yakoots," he says, "believed that this animal worked its way in the earth like a mole. The mammoths had retired, they say, into great caverns from which they never emerge, but wander to and fro in the galleries; and as they pass into one the roof of the gallery rises, and the roof of the one just vacated sinks. The moment this animal sees the light it dies, and the reason why so many carcasses have been exposed to view is because of their having been deceived by the irregular conformation of the earth's surface, thus unintentionally venturing beyond the confines of darkness."[C]

Mastodon and mammoth bones have been discovered in Europe from the earliest times, and a history of the remarkable theories to which they had given rise before the time of Cuvier is very interesting. By the learned of by-gone times the fossils have been mistaken for the bones of Ajax, the "body of Orestes," unicorns, the teeth of St. Christopher, and the remains of Hannibal's elephants. The middle ages have given us a whole library on the subject of a race of giants, whose remains were clearly recognized in the huge bones.

In America, in colonial times, Governor Dudley, of Massachusetts, was "perfectly of opinion" that the mastodon tooth discovered near Albany in 1705 "will agree only to a human body, for whom the flood only could prepare a funeral; and without doubt he waded as long as he could keep his head above the clouds, but must at length be confounded with all other creatures."

At what period the monster became extinct in Europe is a question to which geology gives no answer from the point of view of human history. The evidence rests upon the variously computed age of the beds in which the fossil bones occur. In France, for instance, it is known that the mammoth, whose bones are found in the strata underlying, and therefore older than, the Somme Valley peat, became extinct before the peat stratum, thirty feet thick, which contains no bones, had formed. It had grown, says M. Boucher de Perthes, at the rate of three inches in a hundred years; and if, as geologists say, the mammoth bones of Niagara Falls were deposited in their bed before six miles of the present river gorge were worn by the cataract out of the solid rock, they may be, according to Lyell, 31,000, or Desors, 380,000 years old.

In Siberia, whence most of our information comes, many carcasses of these huge animals have been found preserved entire in the frozen mud. When and how did they perish? Possibly, says the geologist, all at once, overwhelmed by some sudden cataclysm, which, burying the carcasses in the mud, was immediately followed by an intense cold that has lasted ever since; possibly, again, great freshets in the northern rivers, overtaking the migrating herds, swept their carcasses from warmer regions to the shores of the Polar Sea.

In Europe, the fact that the mammoth survived into the human period was proved some years ago by the discovery of human stone implements associated with mammoth bones in the river gravels of the Somme Valley, France, and in the Virgin Cave at Brixham, South Devon, England; but more interesting still, was the discovery of prehistoric carvings of the great elephant, sketches from nature made by the "cave-men," and found in their subterranean dwellings along the river Dordogne in France, illustrations of which will be given in the following pages.

In America, we have traces of a race of savages as old or older than the now famous river-drift and cave-men of Europe. Since the "Calaveras Man" lived, a valley, say geologists, has been metamorphosed, by the slow processes of nature, into a mountain; and the "San Joachim plummet," the "Trenton gravel-flints," and stone implements from the gold-bearing gravels of California, all speak of a race of human beings who must have lived in the time of the hairy mammoth.

But who were these people? Were they Indians? or had the Indian or his ancestor the mound-builder not yet appeared? and how many thousands or tens of thousands of years ago did they exist? These are questions which archæology has not yet answered.

Here, however, with the carving before us we need not go back so far, nor beyond the Indian as we know him—the fierce, roving, bauble-loving, picture-making hunter of to-day. A study of the wonderful outlines on the stone will lead us through a period of his history extending over many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years before the coming of Columbus; and here we may try to read, from the few vestiges of this time that chance has preserved to us, fragments of his picturesque mythology, strange legends of his origin and wanderings over a forest-covered continent, and the thrilling story of the mound-builders, and of long wars when the forest soil for centuries was a "dark and bloody ground."[D]

That the mammoth had survived into the time of the Indian can hardly be doubted. Early travellers had frequently seen its bones at the "Big-Bone Licks" in Kentucky, whither the huge animals had come, like the deer and buffalo of modern times, to lick the salt. The great bones often seemed hardly older than those of the modern animals with which they were mingled, and, judging from their position along the modern buffalo-trails through the forest, it seems that the latter animals had followed the ancient tracks of the mammoth to and from the licks.

Not a few of these early travellers thought it worth their while to question the Indians about the huge bones and note down their answers. Jefferson, in his "Notes on Virginia," devotes several pages to the subject. He even believes the mammoth to be still in existence in his time in some remote part of the American continent. He tells the story of a Mr. Stanley, who, "taken prisoner by the Indians near the mouth of the Tanissee," relates that "after being transferred through several tribes from one to another,