142 REVIEWS. 



paper on Elephants, living and fossil, in the " Natural History 

 Review " for January last. Noting that " there is clear evi- 

 dence of the true Mamiuoth having existed in America long 

 after the period of the northern drift, when the surface of the 

 country had settled down into its present form," and also in 

 Europe so late as to have been a contemporary of the Irish 

 Elk, and on the other hand that it existed in England so far 

 back as before the deposition of the boulder Clay ; also that 

 four well-defined species of fossil Elephant are known to have 

 existed in Europe ; that " a vast number of the remains of 

 three of these species have been exhumed over a large area in 

 Europe ; and, even in the geological sense, an enormous in- 

 terval of time has elapsed between the formation of the most 

 ancient and the most recent of these deposits, quite sufficient 

 to test the persistence of specific characters in an Elephant," 

 he presents the question : " Do then the successive Elephants 

 occurring in these strata show any signs of a passage from 

 the older form into the newer ? " 



To which the reply is : " If there is one fact which is im- 

 pressed on the conviction of the observer with more force than 

 any other, it is the persistence and uniformity of the charac- 

 ters of the molar teeth in the earliest known Mammoth and 

 his most modern successor. . . . Assuming the observation 

 to be correct, what strong proof does it not afford of the per- 

 sistence and constancy, throughout vast intervals of time, of 

 the distinctive characters of those orrans which are most con- 

 cerned in the existence and habits of the species ? If we cast 

 a glance back on the long vista of physical changes which our 

 j)lanet has undergone since the Neozoic Epoch, we can nowhere 

 detect signs of a revolution more sudden and pronounced, or 

 more important in its results, than the intercalation and sud- 

 den disappearance of the glacial period. Yet the ' dicyclo- 

 therian ' Mammoth lived before it, and passed through the 

 ordeal of all the hard extremities it involved, bearing his 

 organs of locomotion and digestion all but unchanged. Tak- 

 ing the group of four European fossil species above enumer- 

 ated, do they show any signs in the successive dej)osits of 

 a transition from the one form into the other ? Here airaiu 



