354 THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MAMMOTH. 



To-day nearly everyone knows that the mammoth was a sort of big, 

 hairy elephant, now extinct, and nearly everyone has a generalidea 

 that it lived in the north. There is some uncertainty as to whether 

 the mammoth was a mastodon, or the mastodon a mammoth, and there 

 is a great deal of misconception as to the size and abundance of this 

 big beast. It may be said in passing that the mastodon is only a sec- 

 ond or third cousin of the mammoth, but that the existing elephant of 

 Asia is a very near relative, certainly as near as a first cousin, possibly 

 a very great grandson. Popularly, the mammoth is supposed to have 

 been a colossus somewhere from 12 to 20 feet in height, beside whom 

 modern elephants would seem insignificant; but as "trout lose much 

 in dressing," so mammoths shrink in measuring, and while there were 

 doubtless Jumbos among them in the way of individuals of exceptional 

 magnitude, the majority were decidedly under Jumbo's size. The 

 only mounted mammoth skeleton in this country, that in the Chicago 

 Academy of Sciences, is one of the largest, the thigh bone measuring 

 5 feet 1 inch in length, or a foot more than that of Jumbo; and as 

 Jumbo stood 11 feet high, the rule of three applied to this thigh bone 

 would give the living animal a height of 13 feet 8 inches. The height 

 of this specimen is given as 13 feet in its bones, with an estimate of l-t 

 feet in its clothes; but as the skeleton is obviously mounted altogether 

 too high, it is pretty safe to saj?^ that 13 feet is a good, fair allow- 

 ance for the height of this animal when alive. As for the majorit}- of 

 mammoths, they would not average more than 9 or 10 feet high. Sir 

 Samuel Baker tells us that he has seen plenty of wild African elephants 

 that would exceed Jumbo by a foot or more, and while this must be 

 accepted with caution, since, unfortunatelv, he neglected to put a tape 

 line on them, yet Mr. Thomas Baines did measure a specimen 12 feet 

 high. This, coupled with Sir Samuel's statement, indicates that there 

 is not so much difference between the mammoth and the elephant as 

 there might be. This applies to the mammoth par excellence, the spe- 

 cies known scientificalh^ as ElepliOH primigenius^ whose remains are 

 found in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere and occur abundantly 

 in Siberia and Alaska. There were other elephants than the mam- 

 moth, and some that exceeded him in size;^ but even the largest can 

 not positively be asserted to have exceeded a height of 13 feet, and it 

 is to be greatly doubted if any one of them could have tossed a 25-foot 

 log over his shoulder. Tusks offer convenient terms of comparison, 

 and those of an average fully grown mammoth are from 8 to 10 feet 

 in length; those of the famous St. Petersburg specimen and those of 

 the huge specimen in Chicago measuring, respectively, 9 feet 3 inches 

 and 9 feet 8 inches. So far as the writer is aware, the largest tusks 



1 Notably Elephm meridionalis of southern Europe and Ekphas columhi of the south- 

 ern United States and Mexico. It is extremely probable that the Chicago skeleton 

 belongs to this latter species, which ranged northwesterly almost to Alaska. 



