What is there about the climate of Siberia that made this strange thing possible?
How did the mammoth get his name? Was it because he was so big—such a "mammoth" creature?[9]
[9] Mammoth, you will find, comes from a word meaning "earth." It didn't mean "big" at all at first. One of the most lovable traits of a good dictionary, I think, is that it tells so many interesting little stories like that about the early life of words; of their days of adventure, so to speak, when there was no telling how they would come out.
How did the mammoths compare in size with the elephants of to-day?
Which was the bigger, the mastodon or the mammoth?
Did we ever have mastodons in North America? And were there mammoths, too?
If you want to see more about what the travelling menageries of the days before the Ice Age looked like hunt up these words: Archelon, dinosaur, ceratosaurus, diplodocus, stegosaurus, triceratops.
See what the geography says about the manufacturing towns of New England and how many of them have water power.
In that remarkable little book by Grant Allen[10] already referred to in the H. & S. at the end of [Chapter I], on [page 139], you will find what the Ice Age had to do with the fact that the rabbits of Canada and our northern border States wear white clothes in winter, while Br'er Rabbit of our Middle and Southern States keeps his yellow-brown suit on all the year.
[10] "Colin Clout's Calendar."