268 PROBOSCIDIA. 
huge grinders enabling them te pound the tough vege- 
table tissue and fit it for deglutition. No doubt the foliage 
is the most tempting, as it is the most succulent part of 
the boughs devoured; but the relation of the complex 
molars to the comminution of the coarser vegetable sub- 
stance is unmistakeable. Now, if we find in an extinct 
Elephant the same peculiar principle of construction in the 
molar teeth, but with augmented complexity, arising from 
a greater number of the triturating plates and a greater 
proportion of the dense enamel, the inference is plain that 
the ligneous fibre must have entered in a larger proportion 
into the food of such extinct species. Forests of hardy 
trees and shrubs still grow upon the frozen soil of Siberia, 
and skirt the banks of the Lena as far north as latitude 
60°. In Europe arboreal vegetation extends ten degrees 
nearer the pole, and the dental organization of the Mam- 
moth proves that it might have derived subsistence from 
the leafless branches of trees, in regions covered during a 
great part of the year with snow. 
We may therefore safely infer, from physiological 
grounds, that the Mammoth would have found the re- 
quisite means of subsistence at the present day, and at all 
seasons, in the sixtieth parallel of latitude ; and, relying 
on the body of evidence adduced by Mr. Lyell, in proof of 
increased severity in the climate of the northern hemi- 
sphere, we may assume that the Mammoth habitually fre- 
quented still higher latitudes at the period of its actual 
existence. “It has been suggested,” observes the same 
philosophic writer, “that, as in our own times, the northern 
animals migrate, so the Siberian Elephant and Rhinoceros 
may have wandered towards the north in summer.” In 
making such excursions during the heat of that brief 
season, the Mammoths would be arrested in their northern 
