KCXZ OX IVORY AM) THE ELEPHANT 



489 



from a find of this kind? What else 

 should they have made out of it but 

 " giants " ? And who, after seeing such 

 evidence with his own eyes, woukl after- 

 ward ha^'e any doubt of the inspiration 

 of Father Roger's sermons or of the 

 truthfulness of Walter's tales of chivalry? 



Mediaeval times and the mediaeval 

 faith passed away, and the skeptical 

 "philosophe" of the seventeenth and 

 eighteenth century sniffed at such evi- 

 dence as this. If it wasn't altogether 

 an old wives' fable, the fossil bones 

 were remains of animals, elephants no 

 doubt or rliinoceroses or some other big 

 beast. But what were they doing in 

 France and Germany — even in E^ng- 

 land? Fighting elephants of course, 

 was the answer, brought over by the 

 Romans or Carthaginians, or possibly 

 some that had been brought for the 

 games in the theaters. Haroun-al- 

 Raschid, we recall, presented an elephant 

 to Charlemagne, who took it with him 

 on a campaign against the Danes. And 

 so the matter rested for a while. 



Finally Cuvier and other scientists of 

 his day, making a really careful com- 

 parison between these fossil elephants 

 and the living ones, showed to a very 

 incredulous world that they were not 

 quite the same as the living Indian or 

 African elephants; that they were 

 really extinct species, animals that had 

 once lived but had completely disap- 

 peared from the earth, whether as a 

 consequence of the Deluge, or of some 

 other, perhaps earlier, convulsion of 

 the earth. 



For by this time the astronomers and 

 geologists had succeeded in impressing 

 upon the world the fact that after all 

 this earth of ours was pretty old and had 

 passed through a good deal of very 

 ancient history before Adam appeared 

 upon it — not less than forty thousand 

 years, the great Buffon had estimated. 



Others were inclined to give even larger 

 figures. 



Thenceforward progress was rapid, 

 both in opinion and in discovery, to- 

 ward the views and the evidence that 

 we hold today. A long succession of 

 extinct faunas, each characterizing a 

 particular epoch of the geological suc- 

 cession, was shown to exist, and it was 

 not long before the evolutionists were 

 searching this succession of faunas for 

 evidence in support of their theories. 

 At first this evidence seemed rather 

 unsatisfactory, so much so that Huxley, 

 when he first turned to it for a test of the 

 truth of Darwinism, saw in the fossil 

 record a strong argument against the 

 theory. Later he changed his views and 

 laid stress, as did Darwin, upon the im- 

 perfection of the record, as the explana- 

 tion for its failure to produce the desired 

 ancestral stages and missing links. As 

 time went on it became possible through 

 the progress of discovery to trace back 

 the ancestry of many modern animals, 

 and not a few of the missing links turned 

 up, no longer missing. 



So far as the elephants were concerned, 

 their history had been traced back, 

 thanks to discoveries in France and 

 Germany, in Greece and in India, to the 

 Miocene epoch of the age of mammals, 

 and a fairly complete series of gradations 

 had been shown to connect up the nar- 

 row-toothed mastodons of that age 

 (Mastodon angustidcns) with the mam- 

 moths and elephants. But there it 

 stopped and until a few years ago 

 nothing was know^n of the earlier history 

 of the race. They appeared in Europe 

 and in North America at that time — 

 immigrants as it seemed from some other 

 region, for no ancestral stages could be 

 found in the older formations of either 

 continent. They might have come from 

 Asia perhaps, but Africa, the Dark 

 Continent of palaeontology, was for 



