EVOLUTION OF THE ELEPHANT LULL. 



655 



Indians seems to allude to the mastodon, especially as its teeth led the 

 earlier observers to suppose that it was a devourer of flesh. Albert 

 Koch, in a small pamphlet on the Missourium (mastodon) discovered 

 by him in Osage County, Missouri, and published in 1843, gives the 

 tradition as follows: 



Ten tboiisiind moons ago, wbeu nothing but gloomy forests covered this land 

 of the sleeping sun — long before the pale man, with thunder and fire at his com- 

 mand, rushed on the wings of the wind to ruin this garden of nature — a race 

 of animals were in being, huge as the frowning precipice, cruel as the bloody 

 panther, swift as the descending eagle, and terrible as the angel of night. The 

 pine crushed beneath their feet and the lakes shrunk when they slaked their 

 thirst ; the forceful javelin in vain was hurled, and the bai'bed arrows fell 

 harmlessly from their sides. Forests were laid waste at a meal and villages 

 inhabited by man were destroyed in a moment. The cry of universal distress 

 reached even to the regions of peace in the West ; when the Good Spirit inter- 

 vened to save the unhappy; his forked lightnings gleamed all around, while the 

 loudest thunder rocked the globe ; the bolts of Heaven were hurled on the cruel 

 destroyers alone, and the mountains echoed with the bellowings of death; all 

 were killed except one male, the fiercest of the race, and him even the artillery 

 of the skies assailed in vain ; he mounts the bluest summit that shades the 

 sources of the Monougahela. and, roaring aloud, bids defiance to every A-engeance ; 

 the red lightning that scorched the lofty fir and rived the knotty oak glanced 

 only on this enraged monster, till at length, maddened with fury, he leaps over 

 the waves of the West, and there reigns an uncontrolled monarch in the wilder- 

 ness, in spite of Omnipotence. 



Part II. 



THE EARLY PROBOSCIDIANS. 



Moeritheriiim. 



The earliest known genus of proboscidians is Moeritherinm^ a small, 

 tapir-like form, from the Middle Eocene Qasr-el-Sagha beds of the 

 Fayum in Egypt. This crea- 

 ture was probably a dweller in 

 swamps, living upon the suc- 

 culent, semiaquatic herbage of 

 that time. It has little that 

 suggests the elephants of later 

 days and, were it not for tran- 

 sitional forms, would hardly 

 be recognized as a proboscid- 

 ian at all. However, one can 

 see the beginnings of distinc- 

 tively elephantine features. The hinder part of the cranium is al- 

 ready beginning to develop the air cells or diploe, the nostril opening 

 and nasal bones are commencing to recede, indicating the presence of 

 a prehensile upper lip, and the reduction of the teeth has begun, the 

 second pair of incisors in each jaw being already developed as tusks. 



Fig. 



-McsrHJierium skull 



(X i). 



after Andrews 



