THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MAMMOTH. 355 



actually measured are two from Alaska, one 12 feet 10 inches long, 

 weight unknown, reported by Mr. Ja}^ Beach, and another 11 feet long, 

 weighing 200 pounds, noted by Mr. T. L. Brevig. Compared with 

 these we have the big tusk that used to stand on Fulton street, New 

 York, just an inch under 9 feet long and weighing 181 pounds, or the 

 largest shown at Chicago in 1893, which was 7 feet 6 inches long and 

 w^eighed 176 pounds.^ 



For our knowledge of the external appearance of the mammoth we 

 are indebted to the more or less entire examples which have been found 

 at various times in Siberia, l)ut mainly to the noted specimen found in 

 1799 near the Lena, embedded in the ice, where it had been reposing, 

 so geologists tell us, anywhere from ten thousand to fifty thousand 

 years. How the creature gradually thawed out of its icy tomb, and 

 the tusks were taken by the discoverer and sold for ivor}^; how the 

 dogs fed upon the flesh in summer, while bears and wolves feasted 

 upon it in winter; how the animal was within an ace of being utterly 

 lost to science when, at the last moment, the mutilated remains were 

 rescued by Mr. Adams, is an old story, often told and retold. Suffice 

 it to say that, besides the bones, enough of the beast was preserved to 

 tell us exactly what was the covering of this 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 characters, 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 originated in western Europe, and not in that 

 great graveyard of fossil elephants, northern India, eastward ho went, 

 spreading over all Europe north of the Pyrenees and Alps, save only 

 Scandinavia, whose glaciers offered no attractions, 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 

 oood old davs when knowledge of anatomv was small and credulity 

 was great. The least absurd theory concerning them was that they 

 were the bones of the elephants which Hannibal brought from Afri(Mi. 

 Occasionally they were brought forward as irrefutable evidences of 



1 Since this was written a pair of enormous tusks of the African elephant have 

 been received in New York and deposited with Messrs. Tiffany & Co., to whom I 

 am indebted for the following information as to their size and weight: Right tusk, 

 10 feet I inch along outer curve, 23 inches in (ircumference, weight 224 pounds. 

 Left tusk, 10 feet 3^ inches along outer curve, 24^- inches in circumference, weight 

 239 pounds. 



