310 PAL/EONTOLOGY. 



most to a variety of the same species of elephant, as that which now 

 lives in tropical regions. Its specific distinction from the existing 

 tropical elephants was then as little -understood as the specific distinc- 

 tion of the African from the Asiatic elephants. 



The moment that zoology and comparative anatomy had made such 

 progress as to discern constant differences interpreted as specific di- 

 stinctions, and to apply the same principle to the differentiation of the 

 fossil elephant of northern regions from either of the existing tropical 

 kinds, the necessity for calling in a cataclysm, either through a hypo- 

 thetical shift in the ecliptic, or the attraction of the ocean upon the 

 continents by a comet, no longer existed. 



Yet Baron Cuvier, to whom we are indebted for the first scientific 

 demonstration of the distinctive characters of the Elephas primigenhis, 

 was as little able to release his mind from the belief in the identity of 

 the habits and food of the extinct elephant with those of the recent, 

 as Hunter was, who nevertheless had not the same ground for con- 

 ceiving a possible difference in its mode of life. Yet nothing is more 

 obvious in zoology than that different species of the same genus are 

 adapted by their very specific distinctions to different climates, have 

 different habits, and subsist on different kinds of food. 



Species of the genus Sus, e. g., exist in a state of nature in the 

 forests of the tropics and of cold temperate latitudes. "Who can forget 

 that fine painting by Joseph Wolf, of the northern wild boar uproot- 

 ing its scanty winter food in a furrow of snow ? Wild boars are hunted 

 in Scandinavia and in Bengal. Suppose the northern species to have 

 become extinct, and the hog, in a wild state, to be known only as 

 a denizen of the tropics : its remains, found in the cold latitudes in 

 which it had formerly lived, would have suggested the same ideas, in 

 reference to the necessity of a tropical climate, the same consequent 

 appeal to a violent departure from the ordinary course of nature, as were 

 entertained and mooted by Hunter in the case of the fossil elephant. 



With regard to the influence of locality, and of the proportions and 

 disposition of sea and land in afiecring climate, I beg to refer to the 

 6th and 7th chapters of Ly ell's 'Principles of Geology,' " On the depend- 

 ence of the mean temperature on the relative position of land and sea," 

 and " The conditions necessary for the production of heat ;" and to the 

 chapter on the " Siberian Mammoth," in my ' History of British Fossil 

 Mammalia,' for the proofs that that species of elephant, together with 

 the similarly warmly-clad rhinoceros, were originally Siberian, and 

 adapted for a temperate if not a cold climate. In the next extract will 

 be given Hunter's matured and final views on the supreme question of 

 the extinction of species. 



