300 PICTURESQUE SKETCHES 



connecting the elephant through the dinotherium 

 with the tapir. In North America this animal was 

 widely distributed, and perfect skeletons of it have 

 been obtained from the great salt-marshes in that 

 country (often many acres in extent), the animal ap- 

 pearing to have resorted thither for the sake of the 

 salt, and becoming occasionally mired, as large heavy 

 quadrupeds frequently are at the present day. The 

 magnitude of the North American swamps or quag- 

 mires, one of which extends for forty miles in a north 

 and south direction, with an occasional breadth of 

 twenty-five miles, renders it probable that some of 

 the more ancient deposits in which the remains of 

 land animals occur, in a similarly perfect state, may 

 also have been of this kind. 



The Mastodon, which with the elephant was a con- 

 temporary of the dinotherium in the period succeed- 

 ing the deposit of the London and Paris beds, exhi- 

 bits in some specimens the singular and interesting 

 phenomenon of small tusks in the lower jaw, besides 

 fully developed tusks, as large as those of the elephant, 

 in the upper jaw ; and of this fact several fragments 

 of the animal that have been met with offer suffi- 

 cient proof. Each group of these gigantic pachy- 

 derms seems to have been very widely spread dur- 

 ing the period immediately subsequent to its intro- 

 duction ; and we meet with the remains of a vast 

 number of individuals not only in Europe but in 

 Asia, while the Mastodon and elephant also extended 

 into North and South America, and even into the 

 great island-continent of Australia. 



The actual period at which the dinotherium and 

 Mastodon became extinct has not yet been fully de- 



