126 THE ELEPHANT 



covered with thick, tufty hair. The animal was fat and 

 well grown. Death had overtaken it in the fullness of its 

 powers. Its parchmentlike, large, naked ears lay fear- 

 fully turned up over the head. About the shoulders and 

 the back it had stiff hair about a foot in length, like a 

 mane. The long outer hair was deep brown and coarsely 

 rooted. The top of the head looked so wild and so 

 permeated with pitch that it resembled the bark of an old 

 oak tree. The whole appearance of the animal was fear- 

 fully strange and wild." From the perfectly preserved 

 contents of the stomach, young shoots of fir and pine, 

 they could tell exactly what had constituted the last meal 

 of the mammoth, so that almost its complete history could 

 be worked out. The men had secured the tusks and were 

 at work on the skin when a flood came and literally tore 

 the body from them and carried it away. 



The fate of this and other mammoths it is not difficult 

 to determine. This one had been ''bogged" in a morass, 

 and its enormous weight had been the means of its death. 

 It had gradually sunk until out of sight, and then had 

 been frozen, to remain for centuries, or until the freshet 

 washed out the old morass. In America three or four 

 skeletons of mastodons have been found together, all 

 standing upright, showing that a small herd had ventured 

 into a quicksand or a bottomless mud deposit, and their 

 combined weight had carried them down. We can imagine 

 their trumpeting and their fierce struggles to escape from 

 the trap into which they may have been driven by human 

 enemies. 



Such were the elephants of yesterday. Those of to-day 

 are still the largest of all land animals. There are two 



