Descriptions of East Asiatic Mammals 305 
the elephants (order proboscidea) 
(family elephantim:) 
The "proboscis animals," the largest of land mammals, are 
represented by two living genera, the Indian Elephants with 
comparatively small ears, and the African Elephants with huge 
ears almost as broad as the animals' heads. 
These two kinds of Elephants are the survivors of a vast 
array of species, genera, and families of trunk-bearing mam- 
mals. Some of those ancestral Elephants had lower as well as 
upper tusks; others had those lower tusks converted into flat 
scoops for rooting up water plants ; and still others had upper 
tusks two or three times as big as the largest in modern Ele- 
phants and variously curled and twisted. 
The cheek teeth of some sorts of Elephants had rather sim- 
ple, rough, knobbed surfaces, as in the extinct Mastodons; on 
the contrary, the Woolly Mammoth, also extinct, had the cheek 
teeth made up of many flat plates set face to face, with their 
hard edges appearing on the surface of the tooth. This plan 
appears in the Indian Elephant, although the plates are less 
numerous. 
The tusks of Elephants are distinguished from the tusks of 
pigs or the canine teeth of wolves through the fact that they are 
enlarged incisor teeth, not canine teeth. Also the molar series 
come into place one at a time at the back of the jaw and move 
forward to the front, where they are shed. This may be com- 
pared to the movement of the treads of a tractor. Not more than 
two are in place at the same time. 
The oldest known member of the Elephant order, when alive, 
was a little tapir-like creature, Mceritherium. Its remains were 
discovered in Egypt. The incisors of that animal had not yet 
become tusks, and it is likely that its trunk was either unde- 
veloped or less developed than the trunks of modern tapirs. 
The Elephant order has very distant relatives in the hyraxes 
