THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
was known to the Greeks, and the ‘licorne’ sent as a present by Haroun-al- 
Raschid to Charlemagne is believed to be amammoth’s tusk. Arabic writers 
Fossil of the tenth century mention it as an article of regular Rus- 
Ivory. sian trade, and ever since that time fossil ivory has come from 
Siberia at a rate calculated to be not less than one hundred pairs of tusks a 
year. Among the strange conceptions of the animal which furnished this 
ivory that arose among people ignorant of elephants was that of the Chinese, 
who said it must be a mole (‘mammoth’ is derived from a Tatar-Russian 
term, meaning earth burrower), because its remains were always found 
underground. This was not so illogical as the pious hypothesis held in 
Europe that these bones were those of St. Christopher.” ” 
Naturalists cannot explain why the mammoths disap- 
peared. They survived the Glacial period and ranged numer- 
ously as far south as the middle of Europe and the central 
United States, so that their extinction cannot be laid to climate. 
They lasted at any rate in the Old World long after the ap- 
pearance of man, persisting even into his Neolithic stage, as 
is proved by associated remains, and prettily demonstrated 
by the famous sketch of the mammoth, etched on a piece of 
its own ivory, by a French artist whose studio was a cave in 
the valley of the Loire; and who showed a better skill in ani- 
mal drawing than is easily commanded to-day in studios by 
the Seine. The primitive men, assailing the mammoth in 
numbers, driving it into inclosures, and entrapping it in pit- 
falls, could overcome it as less capable savages do modern ele- 
phants; and it is probable that in Europe, at least the waning 
species was finally terminated by human agency. 
Contemporary with the early Miocene elephants was an 
Asiatic kind with peculiar teeth called Stegodon; and still 
farther away from the type in tooth structure was another, 
existing at the same time, set apart in the genus Mastodon, 
of which I have given an account elsewhere as follows: — 
“Mastodons began to exist in the Miocene age and became extinct in 
the Pleistocene. They were scattered all over the globe, and more than 
thirty species have been distinguished by palzontologists, the latest 
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