184 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 



ancient elephant, and to show that it was a 

 creature adapted to withstand the northern 

 cold and fitted for living on the branches of 

 the birch and hemlock. 



The exact birthplace of the mammoth is as 

 uncertain as that of many other great charac- 

 ters ; but his earliest known resting-place is in 

 the Cromer Forest Beds of England, a country 

 inhabited by him at a time when the German 

 Ocean was dry land and Great Britain part of 

 a peninsula. Here his remains are found to- 

 day, while from the depths of the North Sea 

 the hardy trawlers have dredged hundreds, aye 

 thousands, of mammoth teeth in company with 

 soles and turbot. If, then, the mammoth orig- 

 ated in western Europe, and not in that great 

 graveyard of fossil elephants, northern India, 

 eastward he went spreading over all Europe 

 north of the Pyrenees and Alps, save only 

 Scandinavia, whose glaciers offered no attrac- 

 tions, scattering his bones abundantly by the 

 wayside to serve as marvels for future ages. 

 Strange indeed have been some of the tales to 

 which these and other elephantine remains 

 have given rise when they came to light in the 



