38S On the Mammoth and the Mastodon, 



we have seen, a liighly complicated and a very peculiar structure, 

 and tliere are no other quadrupeds that derive so great a propor- 

 tion of their food from the woody fibre of the branches of trees. 

 Many mammals browse the leaves ; some small rodents gnaw the 

 bark ; the elephants alone tear down and crunch the branches 

 the vertical enamel-plates of their huge grindeis enabling them to 

 pound the tough vegetable tissue and fit it for deglutition. No 

 doubt the foliage is the most tempting, as it is the most succulent 

 part of the boughs devoured ; but the relation of the complex mo- 

 lars to the comminution of the coarser vegetable substance is un- 

 mistakeable. Now, if we find in an extinct elephant the same 

 peculiar principle of construction in the molar teeth, but with aug- 

 mented complexity, arising from a greater number of the triturat- 

 ing plates and a greater proportion of the dense enamel, the infe- 

 rence is plain that the ligneous fibre must have entered in a larger 

 proportion into the food of such extinct species. Forests of hardy 

 trees and shrubs still grow upon the frozen soil of Siberia, and 

 skirt the banks of the Lena as far north as latitude 60°. In 

 Europe arboreal vegetation extends ten degrees nearer the pole, and 

 the dental organization of the mammoth proves that it might have 

 derived subsistence from the leafless branches of trees, in regions 

 covered during a great part of the year with snow. 



We may therefore safely infer, from physiological grounds, that 

 the mammoth would have found the requisite means of subsistence 

 at the present day, and at all seasons, in the sixtieth parallel of 

 latitude ; and, relying on the body of evidence adduced by Mr. 

 Lyell, in proof of increased severity in the climate of the northern 

 hemisphere, we may assume that the mammoth habitually fre- 

 quented still higher latitudes at the period of its actual existence. 

 " It has been suggested," observes the same philosophic writer, 

 *' that as in our own times, the northern animals migrate, so the 

 Siberian elephant and rhinoceros may have wandered towards 

 the north in summer." In making such excursions during the 

 heat of that brief season, the mammoths would be arrested in their 

 northern progress by a condition to which the reindeer and musk 

 ox are not subject, viz., the limits of arboreal vegetation, which, 

 however, as represented by the dominating shrubs of Polar lands, 

 would allow them to reach the seventieth degree of latitude."^ 



* In the extreme points of Lapland, in 70° north latitude, the pines at 

 tain the height of sixty feet ; and at Enontekessi, in Lapland, in GS'? SO^ north 

 latitude, Von Buck found corn, orchards, and a rich vegetation, at an eleva- 

 tion of 1356 feet above the sea. Lindley, Intr. to Botany, pp. 485, 490. 



