EVOLUTION OF ELEPHANTS 363 



Indian elephants, nature did not find it necessary to produce 

 any such protection. 



There is no reason to conclude from the immense mass 

 of mammoth remains to be found in some parts of the 

 world that many more animals of this kind than of the 

 various other large animal species existed in prehistoric 

 times in these regions. The great abundance of mammoth 

 tusks and teeth is rather to be attributed to the fact that 

 they were larger, harder, and hence less subject to decay 

 than the smaller ones of other animals. Hence while in 

 many instances they have become fossilized, the bones of 

 smaller animals, birds, etc., would pass away in a few years. 

 On the other hand, the slow disintegration of the surface of 

 the large tusks and teeth not seldom acted as a preserva- 

 tive for the interior masses. 



Nevertheless, we are justified in assuming that the 

 number of great mammoths living at one time must have 

 exceeded that of the elephants existing to-day in Africa. 

 Judging from the large quantity of remains found in Alaska, 

 the thirty separate examples discovered in the State of 

 Indiana, the numbers found in New York, Nebraska, Texas, 

 California, and elsewhere in the United States, it is evident 

 that even on this continent mammoths existed in great 

 numbers, and yet, through some strange law of nature, they 

 have entirely passed away almost with the advent of civil- 

 ized man. 



A brief mention will later on be made of the mammoth 

 bones discovered at Borna, Saxony.* An interesting cir- 

 cumstance in this connection was the finding of fragmen- 

 tary plant remains almost certainly of the Glacial Period. 

 The bones of the nearly complete skeleton found here were 

 scattered over an area about 45 ft. wide and 50 ft. long, 

 and although the relative position of the bones was not in 



*See p. 394. 



