DILUVIUM. DRIFT AND ERRATIC BLOCKS. 753 



Among the organic remains of the drifted clays or gravels, the skeletons of colossal 

 herbivorous mammalia occur in great profusion, and are the most remarkable, consisting 

 of the elephant and mastodon animals belonging to the proboscidian tribe, being fur 

 nished with a flexible trunk ; the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the megatherium and 

 megalonyx, the sivatherium, the horse, and the gigantic horned elk. 



Elephant Elephas primigenius of Blumenbach, Elephas fossile of Cuvier, and mam 

 moth of the Russians. There are two species of the living elephant ; the Indian, inhabiting 

 the warm countries of Asia, below 30 of north latitude, but flourishing the most, near to 

 the equator ; and the African, ranging from Senegal to the Cape of Good Hope. The 

 fossil elephant is a distinct species, but agrees more nearly with its Asiatic than with its 

 African congener, its remains being very widely distributed, and found in very high 

 northern latitudes. Several species have been indicated from differences of form in the 

 molar teeth ; but the living animal will suffice for a general description of the extinct 

 race, only supposing more colossal dimensions, a mane, and clothing of long hair. Teeth, 

 tusks, and bones of prodigious size have been met with in different parts of our own 

 island, in the county of Northampton, at Gloucester, at Trenton, near Stafford, and 

 Harwich, in the valleys of the Thames and Medway, in Salisbury Plain, and in Holder- 

 ness, never occurring in the regular strata, but in the overlying drift. They were 

 noticed in the early periods of British history, and occupy a place in the old chronicles. 

 By antiquaries they were once supposed to be the remains of elephants brought over by 

 the armies of Rome an idea which comparative anatomy refuted, by showing their dis 

 cordance with the living species of the genus, and which was seen to be untenable by 

 bones of hippopotami being found in connection with them animals which never could 

 have travelled in the train of the Roman legions. Fossil elephantine remains have been 

 dug up in Ireland and Scotland, in Iceland and Sweden ; and with probability Cuvier 

 conjectured that the bones of supposed giants, mentioned by Pontoppidan as having been 

 found in Norway, were relics of these ancient animals. They have been repeatedly 

 exhumed in North and South America, from the plain of Quito, from Mexico, and the 

 United States ; and throughout Europe they are very generally distributed, appearing in 

 abundance in some localities. Those particular spots, rich in elephantine remains, are at 

 Seilberg, near Cronstadt, on the Necker ; at the village of Theide, near Brunswick ; in 

 the valley of the Arno, near Florence ; and at Bielbecks, near Market Weighton in York 

 shire, in a gravel bed of very limited extent, occupying a hollow of the new red sand 

 stone. Blumenbach states, writing in 1803, that within his knowledge more than two 

 hundred elephants had been found in Germany. It is, however, particularly in the 

 severer latitudes of Asiatic Russia that the fossil elephant is common ; and there the 

 ivory of the tusks is so far uninjured as to be used for ornamental purposes, and sought 

 as an article of profit. To the natives of Siberia the animal is known as the mammoth, 

 signifying an animal of the earth, from the presumption that it was unable to endure the 

 light of day, and actually lived beneath the surface of the soil, like the existing mole. 

 According to Pallas, from the river Don to the promontory of Tchutskoinoss the most 

 easterly point of Asia there is scarcely a stream the banks of which do not afford 

 remains of the mammoth ; and one remarkable case in which the animal was found pre 

 served both the entire skeleton and fleshy parts and inspected by Mr. Adams, an 

 academician of Petersburg, has attracted great attention. 



In the year 1799 a Tungusian fisherman named Schumachoff, who generally went to 

 hunt and fish at the peninsula of Tamut, after the fishing season of the Lena was over, 

 had constructed for his wife some cabins on the banks of the lake Oncoul, and had 

 embarked to seek along the coast for mammoth tusks. During this expedition he one 

 day observed a strange shapeless mass projecting from a bank, the nature of which he did 



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