FOSSIL FOOD 271 



FOSSIL FOOD 



There is something at first sight rather ridiculous in the 

 idea of eating a fossil. To be sure, when the frozen mam- 

 moths of Siberia were first discovered, though they had 

 been dead for at least 80,000 years (according to Dr. Croll's 

 minimum reckoning for the end of the great ice age), and 

 might therefore naturally have begun to get a little musty, 

 they had nevertheless been kept so fresh, like a sort of pre- 

 historic Australian mutton, in their vast natural refrigera- 

 tors, that the wolves and bears greedily devoured the 

 precious relics for which the naturalists of Europe would 

 have been ready gladly to pay the highest market price of 

 best beefsteak. Those carnivorous vandals gnawed off 

 the skin and flesh with the utmost appreciation, and left 

 nothing but the tusks and bones to adorn the galleries of 

 the new Natural History Museum at South Kensington. But 

 then wolves and bears, especially in Siberia, are not exactly 

 fastidious about the nature of their meat diet. Further- 

 more, some of the bones of extinct animals found beneath the 

 stalagmitic floor of caves, in England and elsewhere, pre- 

 sumably of about the same age as the Siberian mammoths, 

 still contain enough animal matter to produce a good strong 

 stock for antediluvian broth, which has been scientifically 

 described by a high authority aa pre- Adamite jelly. The 

 congress of naturalists at Tiibiugen a few years since had 

 a smoking tureen of this cave-bone soup placed upon the 



