CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



moth, the greatest of all the elephants, measuring in height 

 thirteen and a half feet. Just after the Ice Age all these ani- 

 mals died out, just why it is hard to say; perhaps by some 

 contagious disease. 



Of the several Pleistocene mammoths in Asia, only one 

 has survived, the Indian elephant. The Pleistocene ele- 

 phants of Africa are less well known, but two species are 

 still living on that continent, the African elephant, some 

 forms eleven feet high, and a dwarf form from the Congo, 

 which is but four to five feet high. With the changes which 

 took place in Europe after the disappearance of the ice sheet, 

 some land areas became separated from the mainland, and 

 the elephants on these new islands were restricted in their 

 wandering and breeding. On Malta, for instance, there were 

 developed two dwarf forms, related to the elephants of the 

 mainland but consistently small — Elephas melitensis, some 

 five feet high, and the tiniest of all elephants, Elephas jalconi, 

 but three feet high. Sicily, Cyprus, and Crete also had dwarf 

 varieties. 



The successive types that have been thus briefly described 

 form a regular series, illustrated in Fig. 4. On looking at 

 this figure we find it impossible to resist the conclusion that 

 we have here the stages in the evolution of existing elephants 

 — that these animals have come into existence by a series of 

 gradual changes. Little swamp-dwellers with numerous 

 simple teeth capable of crunching succulent aquatic vegetation 

 become adapted, step by step, to life in a forest. The limbs 

 were converted into stout pillars, to support the increasing 

 bulk of the body and to stamp down small plants, and the 

 toes were fused together into an insensitive mass, practically 

 unpierceable by spines or thorns. The snout was drawn out 

 into a muscular, flexible proboscis, capable, on the one hand, 

 of gathering up ground vegetation and, on the other, of 

 taking toll from the foliage of trees. 



[238] 



