150 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 



Christian saints. Did not the church of Valencia 

 possess an elephant tooth which did duty as that of St. 

 Christopher, and, so late as 1789, was not a thigh-bone, 

 figuring as the arm-bone of a saint, carried in proces- 

 sion through the streets in order to bring rain? 



Out of Europe eastward into Asia the mammoth 

 took his way, and having peopled that vast region, took 

 advantage of a land connection then existing between 

 Asia and North America and walked over into Alaska, 

 in company with the forerunners of the bison and the 

 ancestors of the mountain sheep and Alaskan brown 

 bear. Still eastward and southward he went, until he 

 came to the Atlantic coast, the latitude of southern 

 New York roughly marking the southern boundary of 

 the broad domain over which the mammoth roamed 

 undisturbed.! Not that of necessity all this vast area 

 was occupied at one time ; but this was the range of the 

 mammoth during Pleistocene time, for over all this 

 region his bones and teeth are found in greater or less 

 abundance and in varying conditions of preservation. 

 In regions like parts of Siberia and Alaska, where the 

 bones are entombed in a wet and cold, often icy, soil, 

 the bones and tusks are almost as perfectly preserved 

 as though they had been deposited but a score of years 

 ago, while remains so situated that they have been sub- 

 jected to varying conditions of dryness and moisture are 

 always in a fragmentary state. Many bones of the 

 mammoth ,and some fine skulls have been unearthed 

 during the extensive mining operations of the past 

 twenty-five years, but owing to cost of transportation, 

 lack of communications and distances to be traversed 



'This must be taken as a very general statement, as the distinction 

 between and habitats of Elephas primigenius and Elephas columbi, the 

 southern mammoth, are not satisfactorily determined; moreover, the 

 two species overlap through a wide area of the West and Northwest. 



