262 PBOBOSCIDIA. 



that coast. To account for this extraordinary pheno- 

 menon, geologists and naturalists, biassed more or less by 

 the analogy of the existing Elephants, which are restricted 

 to climes where the trees flourish with perennial foliage, 

 have had recourse to the hypothesis of a change of climate 

 in the northern hemisphere, either sudden, and due to a 

 great geological cataclysm,* or gradual, and brought about 

 by progressive alternations of land and sea.^ 



I am far from believing that such changes in the external 

 world were the cause of the ultimate extinction of the 

 Elephas primigenius ; but I am convinced that the pecu- 

 liarities in its ascertained organization are such as to render 

 it quite possible for the animal to have existed as near the 

 pole as is compatible with the growth of hardy trees or 

 shrubs. The fact seems to have been generally overlooked, 

 that an animal organized to gain its subsistence from the 

 branches or woody fibre of trees, is thereby rendered in- 

 dependent of the seasons which regulate the development 

 of leaves and fruit ; the forest-food of such a species be- 

 comes as perennial as the lichens that flourish beneath the 



* Cuvier, ' Discours BUT les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe.' It is obvious 

 that the frozen Mammoth at the mouth of the Lena forms one of the strongest, 

 as well as the most striking, of the celebrated anatomist's assumed " proofs that 

 the revolutions on the earth's surface had been sudden." Cuvier affirms that the 

 Mammoth could not have maintained its existence in the low temperature of the 

 region where its carcass was arrested, and that at the moment when the beast 

 was destroyed, the land which it trod became glacial. " Cette gelee 6ternelle 

 n'occupait pas auparavant les lieux ou ils ont e~t6 saisis ; car ils n'auraient pas pu 

 vivre sous une pareille temperature. C'est done le meme instant qui a fait perir 

 les animaux, et qui a rendu glacial le pays qu'ils habitaient. Cet eve"nement a 

 ete subit, instantane, sans aucune gradation, &c." Ossemens Fossiles, 8vo. ed. 

 1834, torn. i. p. 108. 



f Lyell, ' Principles of Geology,' in which the phenomena that had been sup- 

 posed " to have banished for ever all idea of a slow and gradual revolution," \ were 

 first attempted to be accounted for by the gradual operation of ordinary and ex- 

 isting causes. 



I Jameson's ' Cuvier 's Theory of the Earth,' 8vo. 1813, p. 16. 



