CHAPTER X 
ORDER OF THE ELEPHANTS 
PROBOSCIDEA 
NCE upon a time, after the glacial epoch had ceased to 
cover the northern third of the world with a skullcap 
of solid ice a hundred feet thick, elephants roamed over a 
considerable portion of North America, browsing on the hem- 
locks and cedars that were striving to reforest the great 
devastated area. Indeed, it may be said that our country 
literally was the chosen stamping-ground of all the elephant 
species existing in North America twenty thousand years ago. 
The mammoth of the North (Elephas primigenius) ranged up 
to Point Barrow and Bering Strait, but the other species 
were particularly at home in the United States. 
To-day the fossil remains of the three mammoths and the 
mastodon are scattered from Cape Cod to the Golden Gate, 
and wherever a bog is drained and excavated it is in order to 
look for them. 
Few, indeed, are the museums of America which contain no 
fossil remains, at least in molars or tusks, of the two genera, 
Mastodon and Elephas, of North America. On the whole I 
believe that more American people have seen skeletons or 
teeth of the American mastodon than have yet seen adult 
specimens, living or dead, of the big brown bears of Alaska. 
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