ELEPHANTS. 83 



best known form. These animals unite in a singular fashion the 

 characters of elephants and ordinary " hoofed " quadrupeds. Whilst 

 they possessed horns, they also developed tusks from the eye-teeth ; 

 and from a survey of their complete organisation, Professor Marsh 

 tells us that the position of these unique quadrupeds is intermediate 

 between the elephants themselves and the great order to which the 

 hoofed quadrupeds belong. Dinoceras and its neighbours precede 

 the deinotherium and mastodon in time, and this fact alone is 

 important as bearing on the assumed relationship of these forms. 



It may thus at present be assumed with safety that the evolution 

 of the elephants has taken place from some ancient Eocene quad- 

 ruped stock, represented by the Dinoceras group, which belongs to 

 no one group of living quadrupeds, but is intermediate in its nature, 

 as we have already observed. From some such stock, then, we may 

 figure the deinotherium and mastodon races to have been in due 

 time evolved. The New World in this light must have been the 

 birthplace of the elephant hosts; for the Dinoceras and its neighbours 

 are of North American origin ; migration to the Old World having 

 taken place by continuous land-surface then existent, and the further 

 evolution of the living species and their fossil neighbours having 

 occurred in the Eastern Hemisphere. Thus once again we arrive at 

 the existing races of elephants. These are simply the survivals of 

 an ancient line of quadrupeds, whose history is simply that of every 

 other living being animal or plant a history which, like the un- 

 folding of a flower, leads us from form to form, along pathways of 

 variation and change, and which, at last, as the ages are born and 

 die, evolves from the buried and forgotten races of past monsters, the 

 no less curious and unwieldy quadruped giants of to-day. 



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