42 



brated, has declared, on a like examination, that they 

 are precisely tiie same. J3et\veen two such authorities 

 I will suppose this circumstance equivocal. But, 1, 

 The skeleton of the niaMimoth for so tlie inco'jnitum 

 has been called) bespeaks an animal of five or six times 

 the cubit volume of the elephant, as Muiis. de JiufTon 

 has adiuitted. 2, The jirinders are five tiuies as large, 

 are square, and the grinding surface studded with four 

 or five rows of blunt j)oir)ts: whereas those of the 

 elephant ai-e broad and thin, and their grinding surface 

 flat. 3, I have never hcNird an instance, and su[)[»ose 

 there has been none, of the grinder of an elej)hant be- 

 ing found in America. 4, From the known tem()era- 

 ture and constitution of the ele[.)hant he could never 

 have existed in those regions where the retnains of the 

 nianuiujth have been found. The elephant is a native 

 only of the torrid zone and its vicinities : if, with the 

 assistance of warm apartments and warm clothing, he 

 has been preserved in life in the temperate climates of 

 Kurope, it has only been for a small jjortion of what 

 would ha\'e been iiis natural j)eriod, and no instance of 

 his nmltiplication in them has ever been known. But 

 no bones of the mammoth, as I have before observe^l, 

 have been ever found further south than the salines of 

 the Holston, and they have been found as far north as 

 the Arctic circle. Those, tnerefbre, who are of opin- 

 ion that the elephant and mammoth are the same, njiist 

 believe, ], That the elephant known to us can exist 

 and multiply in the frozen zone ; or, 2, That an eternal 

 fire may once have wajmed those regions, and since 

 abandoned them, of which, however, the globe exhi- 

 bits no unequivocal indications; or, 3, That the obli- 

 quity of the ecliptic, when these elephants lived, was 

 so great as to include within the tropics all those re- 

 gions in which the bones are found: the tropic?; being, 

 as is before observed, the natural limits of habitation 

 for the elephant. But if it be admitted that this obli- 

 quity has really decreased, and we adopt the highest 

 rate of decrease yet pretended, that is of one minute 

 in a century, to transfer the northern tropic to the Arc- 



