ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS. 267 



species which was thus, in so unusual a degree, brought to 

 light, would have been at once pursued to their utmost 

 legitimate boundary, in proof of the adaptation of the 

 Mammoth to a Siberian climate ; but, save the remark 

 that the hairy covering of the Mammoth must have adapt- 

 ed it for a more temperate zone than that assigned to ex- 

 isting elephants,* no further investigations of the relation 

 of its organization to its habits, climate, and mode of life, 

 appear to have been instituted; they have in some in- 

 stances, indeed, been rather checked than promoted. 



Dr. Fleming has observed that " no one acquainted with 

 the gramineous character of the food of our Fallow-deer, 

 Stag, or Roe, would have assigned a lichen to the Rein- 

 deer." But we may readily believe that any one cogni- 

 zant of the food of the Elk, might be likely to have sus- 

 pected cryptogamic vegetation to have entered more large- 

 ly into the food of a still more northern species of the deer 

 tribe. And I can by no means subscribe to another pro- 

 position by the same eminent naturalist, that " the kind of 

 food which the existing species of Elephant prefers, will 

 not enable us to determine, or even to offer a probable 

 conjecture concerning that of the extinct species." The 

 molar teeth of the Elephant possess, as we have seen, a 

 highly complicated, and a very peculiar structure, and 

 there are no other quadrupeds that derive so great a pro- 

 portion of their food from the woody fibre of the branches 

 of trees. Many mammals browse the leaves ; some small 

 rodents gnaw the bark ; the Elephants alone tear down 

 and crunch the branches, the vertical enamel-plates of their 



* " La longue toison dont cet animal etait couvert semblerait meme demontrer, 

 qu'il etait organise pour supporter un degre de froid plus grand que celui 

 qui convient a Telephant de 1'Inde." Pictet, Paleontologie, 8vo. torn. i. 1844, 

 P 71. 



