ABOUT ELEPHANTS. , 499 



the rigors of the ice-age, may have enabled it to survive that period, 

 which was apparently so fatal to elephant life at large. 



Summing up the details we have thus collated, from the geological 

 side, we may now face the problem of the origin of the elephant race. 

 Not that the problem itself is fully answerable, for our knowledge of 

 the elephant race in the past is yet of comparatively limited extent ; 

 but the main lines of the biological argument are clear enough to those 

 who will consider, even casually, the evidence already at hand. It is 

 thus clear that the true elephants, which belong to the Pliocene pe- 

 riod, are ushered into existence, so to speak, by forms that are less 

 typical elephants mastodon and dinotherium when judged by the 

 standard of existent elephantine structure. There are various species 

 of mastodons known to geologists, which exhibit a gradation in the 

 matter of their teeth, and presumably in other structural aspects as 

 well, toward the ordinary elephant type. As the mastodons precede 

 the ordinary elephants in time, we shall not be deducing an unwar- 

 rantable inference if we maintain that the origin of the true elephants, 

 both fossil and living forms, may safely be regarded as arising from 

 the mastodon stock. The elephants of to-day are connected by links 

 of obvious nature with the Pliocene and Post-Pliocene forms ; and, 

 when the " ice-age " cleared the earth of the vast majority of the spe- 

 cies, the progenitors of our living elephants must have escaped de- 

 struction and have survived the cold, possibly in the regions wherein 

 they now exist, just as the mammoth, in its turn, survived the rigors 

 of the ice-period, through the presence of its woolly coating and its 

 hardier constitution. There seems thus to be no special difficulty, 

 either of purely geological or of intellectual nature, in conceiving that 

 the elephants of to-day are simply survivals of that elephantine host, 

 whose existence was well-nigh terminated by the " ice-age," and which 

 left the mammoth, and the progenitors of our living elephants, to re- 

 plenish the earth after a catastrophe as sweeping and fatal in its nature 

 as any deluge. 



But if the origin of the modern and later elephants may thus be 

 accounted for, and if their geographical birthplace may be assumed to 

 exist within the confines of the Old World, a more fundamental and 

 anterior query may be put with reference to the origin of the masto- 

 don stock, which we have supposed, and with reason, is the founder of 

 the true elephant races. From what stock, in other words, did the 

 mastodons themselves arise ? The chain of organic causation, to be 

 perfect and complete, can not assume the mysterious origin of the 

 mastodon. That stock must, in its turn, have originated in an ances- 

 try less like the elephants than itself. It is not improbable that the 

 evolutionist of the future will seek and find the mastodon ancestry in 

 the dinotherium group, or in some nearly related forms. For, as we 

 have seen, the dinotherium exhibits a structure which appears to re- 

 late the elephants to>other and lower quadrupeds, such as the sea-cows 



