THE STORY OF THE ELEPHANTS 273 



of the European fossil elephants were distinct in species from 

 both the African and the Indian elephant, the only two living 

 species (El. africanus and El. indicus). This fundamental fact 

 opened out to him new views about the creation of the world 

 and its inhabitants, and a rapid glance over other fossil bones in 

 his collection showed him the truth and the value of this great 

 idea (namely, the existence of extinct types), to which he con- 

 secrated the rest of his life. Thus palaeontology may be said to 

 have been founded on the Mammoth. 



The fossil remains of elephants have, on account of their 

 common occurrence in various parts of the world, attracted 

 a great deal of attention, both from the learned and the 

 unlearned. In the north of Europe they have been found in 

 Ireland, in Germany ; in Central Europe, in Poland, Middle and 

 South Eussia, Greece, Spain, Italy; also in Africa, and over a 

 large part of Asia. In the New World they have been found 

 abundantly in North America. But in the frozen regions of 

 Siberia their tusks, teeth, and bones are met with in very great 

 abundance. According to Pallas, the great Eussian savant, there 

 is not in the whole of Asiatic Eussia, from the Don to the 

 extremity of the Tchutchian promontory, any brook or river on 

 the banks of which some bones of elephants and other animals 

 foreign to these regions have not been found. The primaeval 

 elephants (Mammoth, Mastodon, etc.) appear to have formerly 

 ranged over the whole northern hemisphere of the globe, from the 

 fortieth parallel to the sixtieth, and possibly to near the seventieth 

 degree of latitude. 



Just as the North American Indian regards the great bones of 

 Professor Marsh's extinct Eocene mammals that peep out from 

 the sides of buttes and canons, as belonging to his ancestors, 

 so we find that in all parts of the world the bones of extinct 



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