240 SPARKS FROM A GEOLOGIST'S HAMMER. 



have excited the wonder and inquiry of every American 

 citizen, possesses much more than a commercial impor- 

 tance. Here, at length, is the full embodiment of the 

 creature whose teeth and bones our bogs have been yield- 

 ing up for a couple of centuries past. Some of us have 

 seen the ponderous bones of his near relative, the masto- 

 don, bolted together in due order, in the museums at 

 Boston, Albany, Chicago and elsewhere, but this mightier 

 proboscidian has never furnished us a complete skeleton. 

 Still stranger to American eyes is the towering shaggy 

 form of the mammoth as clothed in flesh and elephantine 

 fur. This and the mastodon are the beasts of which our 

 Indians preserve some distinct traditions. This is the 

 beast once hunted by the prehistoric inhabitant of Europe. 

 It was the figure of such game that European man in 

 the Stone Age sometimes etched on plates of ivory. It 

 is a coincidence of great interest that palaeolithic man in 

 America was a co-tenant with the same quadruped, and 

 executed similar sketches upon the animal's own ivory; 

 for in at least two instances such outlines, traced on ivory, 

 have been taken from " mounds " in the Mississippi valley. 

 By our relationship to the primitive populations of two 

 continents, therefore, our interest impels us to learn more 

 of the life and times of the colossal game which was once 

 pursued with rude implements of flint and bone. 



Histoi-y has preserved no mention of the existence of 

 the mammoth in the living state; but its bones are scat- 

 tered over the whole of Eui-ope and northern Asia as far 

 as Behring's Straits ; even on the American side of the 

 straits they occur in similar abundance. But it was, ac- 

 cording to prevailing scientific opinion, a somewhat differ- 

 ent species of mammoth which left its remains throughout 



