540 //. Woodward — On the Mammoth, 



11. — On the Curvature of the Tusks in the Mammoth, 

 Elephas pbimigenius (Blumenbach).^ 



By Henry Woodward, F.G.S., F.Z.S., &c., of the British Museum. 



[PLATES XXII. and XXIII.] 



THE object of this paper is to call attention to the magnificent 

 head of the Mammoth, discovered by Antonio Brady, Esq., 

 F.G.S., of Maryland Point, Stratford, Essex, in a brick-pit at Ilford, 

 in 1864, and now placed in the Geological Department of the British 

 Museum."'* 



This remarkable fossil still remains quite unique, no other skull 

 having ever been exhumed in anything like a perfect state, owing to 

 the very friable and perishable condition in which the bones are 

 found in most of our river-valley deposits. 



But the immense number of molars met with, and also of more or 

 less entire tusks, attest their former numerical abundance. 



Mr. Antonio Brady has lately obtained four almost entire tusks of 

 the Mammoth, from the same pit which yielded the head, and he has, 

 in his collection, tusks and molar teeth of elephants of all ages, from 

 the milk-molars of the calf, a year old, to the remains of such 

 veterans as that figured in our plate. 



All the larger of Mr. Brady's tusks, also those from the Eev. J. 

 Layton's collection, dredged off Hasboro', on the Norfolk coast, and 

 the very perfect tusk found in a gravel-]3it south of Spalding, Lin- 

 colnshire, agree exactly in their general curvature, as do also the 

 specimens in the British Museum from Escholtz Bay and Siberia, 

 and these likewise correspond with the tusks of the Ilford cranium, 

 the left tusk of which still remains in the alveolus. 



The drawing of Adams's Mammoth, found in Siberia in 1799,^ 

 well known from Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins's clever diagram, has 

 the extremities of its tusks curved in a competely reverse direction 

 to that of our British example. 



Dr. Tilesius observes {op. cit?), "The Mammoth is distinguished 

 from the African and Indian Elephants, by the teeth, and by' the 

 size of the tusks, which are from ten to fifteen feet long, much 

 curved, and have a spiral turn outwards. The alveoli of the tusks 

 are also larger, and are produced further." 



In Benkendorf 's graphic narrative of the finding of an entire 

 Mammoth, in a half-frozen condition, in the river Indigirka, in 

 1846 (noticed by Mr. W. Boyd Dawkins in a paper " On the Range 



^ The substance of this paper was read before the International Congress of Pre- 

 historic ArchaGology (Third Session), Norwich, August 25, 1868. 



2 A brief account of this specimen appeared in Vol. I. of the Geological Maga- 

 zine, 1864, p. 241, accompanied by a wood-engraving, representing a side-view of the 

 skull, with its one attached tusk. The specimen was not, at that time, set up in the 

 gallery, so that the artist was unable to obtain a favourable view of its peculiar 

 features. 



3 Figured in the Memoirs of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg, 

 vol. v., and in the abridged English translation of Dr. Tilesius's paper, printed in 

 London, in 1819 (Select Strzelecki Edition). 



