Distribution, Food and Climate of the Mammoth. 17 



appear to have been instituted; they have in some instances, 

 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 Reindeer." But we may 

 readily believe that any one cognizant of the food of the Elk, 

 might be likely to have suspected cryptogamic vegetation to have 

 entered more largely into the food of a still more northern species 

 of the deer tribe. And I can by no means subscribe to another 

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

 food which the existing species of Elephant prefers, will not ena- 

 ble us to determine, or even to offer a probable conjecture con- 

 cerning that of the extinct species. 75 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 proportion 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 craunch the branches, the vertical enamel plates of 

 their huge grinders enabling then to pound the tough vegetable 

 tissue and fit it for deglutition. No doubt the foliage is the most 

 tempting, as it is the most succulent part of the boughs devoured ; 

 but the relation of complex molars to the comminution of the 

 coarser vegetable substance is unmistakeable. Now if we find 

 in an extinct Elephant the same peculiar principle of construc- 

 tion in the molar teeth, but with augmented complexity, arising 

 from a greater number of the triturating plates and a greater pro- 

 portion of the dense enamel, the inference is plain that the lig- 

 neous fibre must have entered in a larger proportion into the food 

 of such extinct species. Forests of hardy trees and shrubs still 

 grow upon the frozen soil of Siberia, and skirt the banks of the 

 Lena as far north as latitude 60°. In Europe, arboreal vegeta- 

 tion extends ten degrees nearer the pole, and the dental organiza- 

 tion of the Mammoth proves that it might have derived subsis- 

 tence from the leafless branches of trees, in regions covered dur- 

 ing a great part of the year with snow. 



We may therefore safely infer from physiological grounds, that 

 the Mammoth would have found the requisite means of subsist- 

 ence at the present day, and at all seasons, in the sixtieth parallel 

 of latitude; and relying on the body of evidence adduced by Mr. 

 Lyell in proof of increased severity in the climate of the northern 

 hemisphere, we may assume that the Mammoth habitually fre- 

 quented still higher latitudes at the period of its actual existence. 

 " It has been suggested," observes the same philosophic writer, 

 " that, as in our own times, the northern animals migrate, so the 

 Siberian Elephant and Rhinoceros may have wandered towards 

 the north in summer." In making such excursions during the 



Second Series, Vol. IV, No. 10.— Julv, 1847. 3 



