SOME thousands of years ago—no long period in the history of creation, though so far outstripping the written records of man—gigantic animals, with huge trunks and ivory tusks, forming the family of Proboscideæ, were distributed throughout all the northern regions of Europe, Asia, and America.
Of this family the most ancient and colossal representative is the Dinotherium, which appears to have flourished in the Miocene period of the Tertiary epoch, and a skull of which was disinterred at Eppelsheim, in Hesse Darmstadt, in 1836, measuring about four feet in length and three in breadth; whence Cuvier inferred that the total length of the animal was probably eighteen feet. This pachyderm, which far surpassed in size the largest living elephant, had a comparatively short trunk, and tusks inserted in front of the lower jaw. Such a lower jaw could hardly have been otherwise than cumbrous and inconvenient to the quadruped if he lived on land. No such disadvantage, as Dr. Buckland remarks,[171] would have attended this structure in a large animal destined to live in water; and the aquatic habits of the family of Tapirs, to which the Dinotherium was most nearly allied, render it probable that, like them, it was an inhabitant of fresh-water lakes and rivers.
Two other kinds of Proboscidians, the Mastodon and the Mammoth, belong to the Pleiocene period, the last of the Tertiary epoch, and to the Intermediate or Glacial deposits, which immediately preceded the modern epoch. The Mastodon only differed essentially from the Elephant in his dental apparatus. His molar teeth were covered with conical projections, whence his name; he had two small tusks, planted in the lower jaw like those of the Dinotherium, but bent forward, and two others in the upper jaw, having the same direction, but being of a prodigious length. Buffon named it the “Animal of the Ohio,” because its fossil remains were discovered on the banks of that great river. They have also been found in other parts of North America, and particularly in the saline morass known as Big-bone Lick, in the northern districts of Kentucky. Several skeletons, almost perfect, have been excavated at a moderate depth, and some of them in a vertical position, as if the animals had been stricken with death while standing, and suddenly engulfed in the mud.
Many curious fables are told by the Indians in reference to this extinct quadruped. The Shawnee Indians believe that contemporary with them lived a race of men of proportionate dimensions, and that the Great Being destroyed both the one and the other with thunderbolts. Those of Virginia state that the “Great Man on High” slew this colossal genus, because it was exterminating the animals created for the use of man, and that none escaped but the hugest bull, who, having been wounded by the celestial bolts, fled towards the great lakes, in whose solitudes he wanders to this very day. The Indians of Canada and Louisiana designate the Mastodon by the name of “Father of the Bulls,” probably on account of the bones of cattle disinterred with his own.
The Mammoth (Elephas primigenius) is known to us only by the fossil remains which have been discovered embedded in the glacial deposits of the Intermediate epoch. The first discovery took place in 1799, under circumstances which are thus recorded in the Zoologist.
In 1799, a Tungusian fisherman observed, in a bank on the shore of the Frozen Ocean, at the mouth of the river Lena, a shapeless mass almost enveloped in ice, and he was quite unable to determine what it might be. In the following year a larger portion of this mass became visible, but the fisherman was still unable to discover its nature. Towards the end of the following summer, however, one of the tusks and an entire side of a fossilized animal were exposed. But it was not until the fifth year from its discovery, when the ice had melted sooner than usual, that the enormous animal became entirely detached from the bank or cliff in which it was first observed, and came thundering down upon a sand-bank below. In the month of March 1804, the fisherman extracted the tusks, which were nine feet six inches long, and together weighed 360 pounds, and sold them at Yakoutsk for fifty roubles. Two years afterwards, Mr. Adams, a traveller, visited the animal, and found it much mutilated. The Yakoutes residing in the neighbourhood had cut away the flesh to feed their dogs; wild beasts had also eaten a great quantity of it. Nevertheless, with the exception of a fore-leg, the skeleton was entire; the other bones being still held together by ligaments and portions of skin. The head was covered with dried skin; one of the ears was entire, and furnished with a tuft of hairs; the pupil of the eye was still to be distinguished; the brain was in the skull, but somewhat dried; the lower lip had been gnawed by animals, the upper one was entirely gone, and the teeth were consequently exposed; the neck was furnished with a long mane; the skin was covered with long hair and a reddish wool; the portion of skin still remaining was so heavy that two men could scarcely carry it; according to Mr. Adams, more than thirty pounds’ weight of hair and wool was collected from the wet sand into which it had been trodden by the white bears while devouring the flesh. This skeleton is now preserved in the Museum of the Academy of St. Petersburg. The height of the creature is about nine feet, and its extreme length to the tip of the tail about sixteen feet.
A second carcass was afterwards discovered on the bank of the Asaleïa, which empties its waters into the Frozen Sea, by the traveller Sarytcheff. It was standing upright, and wholly covered with its skin and fur. Finally, a third has been recently found in the same region, and the Museum at Paris possesses a portion of its skin, with a tuft of wool, and some relics of the mane.
The Mammoth, therefore, would seem to be a link connecting the past and the present worlds, a being whose body has outlived its destination. Evidently it was adapted to brave the winters of a boreal clime; its long, warm, and woolly coat forming an admirable defence against the severest cold. It probably inhabited the icy plains, and the banks of the lakes and rivers; its food consisting of lichens, reeds, and the young shoots of the willows and other trees which thrive in moist situations.
The Mammoth naturally leads us to an examination of his descendant and congener, the Elephant; the largest and strongest, the most sagacious and docile of all living animals.
Elephants, of which only two species at present exist, the Asiatic and African, are natives of tropical regions, where they prefer to inhabit the depths of the forests, quitting their umbrageous recesses only at night, in search of food, or to quench their thirst in the nearest stream.