February 0th, 1884. 



The weather was again wild and stormy, but about sixty mem- 

 bers and friends assembled. The Secretary (Mr. H. Ullyett) read 

 a paper, illustrated by Lantern Slides, on 



THE MAMMOTH AND ITS EXTINCTION. 



Very recently I came across a small pamphlet in a corner of my 

 bookshelves which I had evidently read and well-nigh forgotten. 

 Its title was attractive : 'M Day's Eh'phant Hunting in JEssex, ISSO."" 

 I read it again. Hunting Elephants in Essex at such a recent 

 date seems doubtless, an improbability; — "perhaps an escape 

 from a menagerie," you may say. No ; it was a veritable genuine 

 elephant hunt ; and what is more, it was only one of a series of 

 such. About sixty ladies and gentlemen alighted at Ilford Station 

 and at once set out bent on discovering, if not elephants, then 

 traces of elephants, for they knew they were there. Each wa& 

 armed with a not very formidable weapon, — a kind of combined 

 hammer and pickaxe ; in fine, it was a Field Day of the Epping- 

 Forest Naturalists, — a visit to the spot where in 1863, the first 

 perfect skull of a British Mammoth was found, A grand specimen 

 it was too, the tusks measuring eight feet eight inches in length.. 

 Since that date the remains of over one hundred Mammoths hav(v 

 been disinterred near Ilford, and along with them skulls, bones^ 

 and teeth of three kinds of Ehinoceros, Hippopotamus, a second 

 species of Elephant, together with other creatures, in all nineteen 

 species of animals, now mostly extinct. 



Tempora mutantur, those peaceful industrious Eastern Counties- 

 are now covered with cornfields and pasture grounds. But there 

 was a time, long long ago, yet still in the early days of Man, when 

 herds of huge Elephants, Mammoths, and others, wandered among 

 the recesses of a mighty forest, of which Epping and Hainault are 

 now the puny representatives. Up the valley of the Thames they 

 roamed to the west, and with them went the Rhinoceros and 

 Hippopotamus, the Bison and the great Irish Elk, followed not 

 only "by wild cats and lions of enormous size, but also by their 

 greatest foe. Palaeolithic Man, armed with his flint weapons of the 

 chase, Far out to the east they strayed, over the bed of the pre- 

 sent North Sea, then dry land, and covered with a luxuriant vegeta- 

 tion ; and they bathed in and drank of the water of the streams 

 that fed the ancient Khine, which over that plain worked its way 

 hundreds of miles farther to the north than it does now, receiving- 

 tribute from all the eastern rivers of Great Britain, not then an 

 island. During the years 1820 — 1833, the Norfolk fishermen ia 



