WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG 181 



the St. Petersburg Museum, where the tusks measure 

 nine feet six inches ; but a semicircle was more common. 

 The mammoth skeletons are usually over nine feet in 

 height, and fifteen feet in length, and when we add muscles 

 and skin, we shall have a very large beast indeed. 



The modern elephant is only to be found in hot coun- 

 tries, and is confined to Africa and to India. The mam- 

 moth, on the contrary, preferred a cold or temperate 

 climate, and roamed all over Europe, North America, 

 Siberia, and the northern part of Africa. There is scarcely 

 a single English county, except perhaps Cornwall, where 

 its bones have not been found, in the soft clays and gravels 

 and soil washed down by the rivers in the far-off days, 

 when the earliest race of man appeared on the earth. 



How strange it would seem to us now, taking a 

 walk along the wooded banks of the Thames near Ox- 

 ford, to stumble suddenly on a gigantic mammoth, tearing 

 down the sweet young branches with his trunk ! He 

 must have looked a huge monster, indeed, with his 

 powerful tusks, often nearly eleven feet long, and his thick 

 coat adapted to face the snows of England and Russia, 

 and the still greater cold of North Siberia. Over his dark 

 grey skin the soft brown wool curled closely, and, above 

 that, was an outer garment of long, almost black hair. Big 

 and clumsy as an elephant is, a mammoth was bigger and 

 clumsier still ; but he was by no means the only great 

 animal that found England in those times a pleasant 

 place to live in ; for, in many instances, the bones of the 

 hippopotamus and a woolly rhinoceros are to be seen 

 buried beside him, while lions, tigers, and hyenas had 

 not yet wandered to the south. 



In those days, as in these, the elephant tribe, of which 

 the mammoth was one, fed on vegetable substances, and 

 even in Siberia, where such enormous numbers of their 

 frozen remains have been discovered, there was obviously 

 some sort of food for them. Birches, willows, and fir 

 trees of various kinds, grew then, as now, in those bleak 



