THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
along with the bones of the big species. At that time the Brit- 
ish Isles, too, had elephants whose bones, when unearthed in 
medizeval times, gave rise to strange stories of giants and mon- 
sters among the simple folk of the Thames Valley, as one may 
read in the genial musings of Sir Thomas Browne, or the critical 
histories of Watkins “* and Boyd-Dawkins.* 
Back to the Miocene may be traced the history of the genus 
Elephas; and even the oldest species survived till after man had 
appeared, and might 
very likely have re- 
mained until to-day 
had they not been 
hunted to death. One, 
the mammoth, is 
world-famous, partly 
on account of the fact 
that it was world-wide 
SKULL AND TUSKS OF THE IMPERIAL Mamoru. in its distribution, but 
From a photograph of the specimen on exhibition in mainly because of the 
the American Museum of Natural History, New 3 
York, showing the imward curve of the tusks, fortunate accident by 
hitherto wrongly placed in all mounted skeletons which its bodies have 
and restorations, due to the transposition of the 
tusks — the right-hand one where the left-hand one been preserved to us 
cla entire in the ice cliffs 
of Siberia — cold-storage warehouses keeping for modern eyes 
many examples of the preglacial fauna. 
In those days the northern parts of both the Old World and 
the New were more extensive in dry land and milder in climate 
than now. The Bering Sea region was partly or wholly out of 
water, and the animals of Asia for unnumbered centuries passed 
dry-shod into Alaska and thence spread southward. The British 
Isles were a part of the continent of Europe, the bed of the 
present German ocean was a wooded plain, and the pine woods 
of Siberia and Canada grew luxuriantly to the borders of the 
Arctic Ocean. Through those far northern forests wandered 
388 
