CHAPTER X 

 ORDER OF THE ELEPHANTS 



PROBOSCIDEA 



ONCE upon a tinie, after the glacial epoch had ceased to 

 cover the northern third of the world with a skullcap 

 of solid ice a hundred feet thick, elephants roamed over a 

 considerable portion of North America, browsing on the hem- 

 locks and cedars that were striving to reforest the great 

 devastated area. Indeed, it may be said that our country 

 literally was the chosen stamping-ground of all the elephant 

 species existing in North America twenty thousand years ago. 

 The mammoth of the North (Elephas pri mi genius) ranged up 

 to Point Barrow and Bering Strait, but the other species 

 were particularly at home in the United States. 



To-day the fossil remains of the three mammoths and the 

 mastodon are scattered from Cape Cod to the Golden Gate, 

 and wherever a bog is drained and excavated it is in order to 

 look for them. 



Few, indeed, are the museums of America which contain no 

 fossil remains, at least in molars or tusks, of the two genera, 

 Mastodon and Elephas, of North America. On the whole I 

 believe that more American people have seen skeletons or 

 teeth of the American mastodon than have yet seen adult 

 specimens, living or dead, of the big brown bears of Alaska. 



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