6 
Fresruary 61TH, 1884. 
The weather was again wild and stormy, but about sixty mem- 
bers and friends assembled. The Secretary (Mr. H. Ullyett) read 
a paper. illustrated by Lantern Slides, on 
THE MAMMOTH AND ITS EXTINCTION. 
Very recently I came across a small pamphlet in a corner of my 
bookshelves which I had evidently read and well-nigh forgotten. 
Its title was attractive: ‘‘A4 Day’s Elephant Hunting in Essex, 1880.” 
I read it again. Hunting Elephants in Essex at such a recent 
date seems doubtless, an improbability ;— ‘‘ perhaps an escape 
from a menagerie,” you may say. No; it was a veritable genuine 
elephant hunt; and what is more, it was only one of a series of 
such. About sixty ladies and gentlemen alighted at Ilford Station 
and at once set out bent on ‘discovering, if not elephants, then 
traces of elephants, for they knew they were there. Each was 
armed with a not very formidable weapon,—a kind of combined. 
hammer and pickaxe ; in fine, it was a Field Day of the Epping 
Forest Naturalists,—a visit to the spot where in 1863, the first 
perfect skull of a British Mammoth was found. A grand specimen 
it was too, the tusks measuring eight feet eight inches in length. 
Since that date the remains of over one hundred Mammoths have 
been disinterred near Ilford, and along with them skulls, bones,. 
and teeth of three kinds of Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, a second. 
species of Elephant, together with other creatures, in all nineteen: 
species of animals, now mostly extinct. 
Tempora mutantur, those peaceful industrious Eastern Counties: 
are now covered with cornfields and pasture grounds. But there 
was a time, long long ago, yet still in the early days of Man, when 
herds of huge Elephants, Mammoths, and others, wandered among 
the recesses of a mighty forest, of which Epping and Hainault are 
now the puny representatives. Up the valley of the Thames they 
roamed to the west, and with them went the Rhinoceros and. 
Hippopotamus, the Bison and the great Irish Elk, followed not. 
only ‘‘by wild cats and lions of enormous size, but also by their 
greatest foe, Paleolithic Man, armed with his flint weapons of the- 
chase, Far out to the east they strayed, over the bed of the pre- 
sent North Sea, then dry land, and covered with a luxuriant vegeta- 
tion ; and they bathed in and drank of the water of the streams. 
that fed the ancient Rhine, which over that plain worked its way 
hundreds of miles farther to the north than it does now, receiving 
tribute from all the eastern rivers of Great Britain, not then an 
island. During the years 1820—1833, the Norfolk fishermen in 
