262 PROBOSCIDIA. 
that coast. To account for this extraordinary pheno- 
menon, geologists and naturalists, biassed more or less by 
the analogy of the existing Elephants, which are restricted 
to climes where the trees flourish with perennial foliage, 
have had recourse to the hypothesis of a change of climate 
in the northern hemisphere, either sudden, and due to a 
great geological cataclysm,* or gradual, and brought about 
by progressive alternations of land and sea. 
I am far from believing that such changes in the external 
world were the cause of the ultimate extinction of the 
Elephas primigenius ; but I am convinced that the pecu- 
liarities in its ascertained organization are such as to render 
it quite possible for the animal to have existed as near the 
pole as is compatible with the growth of hardy trees or 
shrubs. The fact seems to have been generally overlooked, 
that an animal organized to gain its subsistence from the 
branches or woody fibre of trees, is thereby rendered in- 
dependent of the seasons which regulate the development 
of leaves and fruit ; the forest-food of such a species be- 
comes as perennial as the lichens that flourish beneath the 
* Cuvier, ‘Discours sur les Révolutions de la Surface du Globe.’ It is obvious 
that the frozen Mammoth at the mouth of the Lena forms one of the strongest, 
as well as the most striking, of the celebrated anatomist’s assumed “ proofs that 
the revolutions on the earth’s surface had been sudden.” Cuvier affirms that the 
Mammoth could not have maintained its existence in the low temperature of the 
region where its carcass was arrested, and that at the moment when the beast 
was destroyed, the land which it trod became glacial. “Cette gelée éternelle 
n’oceupait pas auparayant les lieux ot ils ont été saisis ; car ils n’auraient pas pu 
vivre sous une pareille température. C’est done le méme instant qui a fait périr 
les animaux, et qui a rendu glacial le pays qu’ils habitaient. Cet événement a 
été subit, instantané, sans aucune gradation, &c.”—Ossemens Fossiles, 8vo. ed. 
1834, tom. i. p. 108. 
+ Lyell, ¢ Principles of Geology,’ in which the phenomena that had been sup- 
posed “ to have banished for ever all idea of a slow and gradual revolution,” ¢ were 
first attempted to be accounted for by the gradual operation of ordinary and ex- 
isting causes. 
+ Jameson’s ‘ Cuvier’s Theory of the Earth,’ 8vo. 1813, p. 16. 
