328 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1919. 
The only explanation which at first sight appears satisfactory in this 
respect is the one offered by such writers as Cuvier and d’Archiac 
and brought up again by Howarth; it consists in admitting the ap- 
pearance of sudden and intense cold sufficiently severe to have killed 
on the spot the mammoths as well as some other mammals, one of 
the best known of which is the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, and sufi- 
ciently persistent to have preserved the bodies. As this assumption 
of sudden glacial cataclysms rested on other arguments than the dis- 
appearance of a few animals, it resulted that the hypothesis relative 
to this disappearance became an essential part of a general theory 
regarding certain large geological phenomena of the quaternary 
period—transportation of bowlders, deposition of alluvial material, 
etc.—a theory essentially admitting a diluvial catastrophe in one or 
several acts, accompanied by an intense cold suddenly spread over 
vast areas and producing there a group of phenomena one of which 
would have been the brutal extinction of life, at least as concerned 
certain mammals. 
At present no one sustains this theory, so far as I know. As to the 
mammoth it is admitted that, while being able, thanks to its thick 
fur, to withstand cold, the animal succumbed “ because the invasion 
of dry cold killed off the vegetation which supported it” (de Lap- 
parent). Going somewhat further into detail, it has been admitted 
that the mammoth could have inhabited France, England, and Ger- 
many during the prevalence of a cold and humid climate (de Lap- 
parent’s second Pleistocene age), which permitted the existence of a 
vegetation sufficient to feed it, but where its extinction was the work of 
man (Reid‘), while in Siberia it might have been the victim of 
the lack of food brought on by the increase of cold, there being noth- 
ing to prove that the extinction was simultaneous, in the various 
regions where the mammoth lived. 
These explanations are not convincing. 
In the first place, it is difficult to admit that the extinction of the 
mammoth could have been, in any region whatever, the work of man, 
any more, for that matter, than the work of wild beasts. Like the 
elephants of the present day, the mammoth could not have known 
really dangerous enemies among the beasts of prey; and, just as the 
primitive hunting methods of the African natives have never, it 
seems, been able to bring about the extinction of the African ele- 
phants,® those of the hunters of the stone age probably never caused 
the extermination of the mammoth over the whole of any extensive 
area. 
4 Geological Magazine, vol. 9, p. 44. 1882. 
5 Abyssinian traditions say that the elephant has killed more men than man has ever 
killed elephants. 
