THE TIME OF THE MAMMOTHS. 163 
which at one stroke drove from the face of earth two of the 
most powerful races of its inhabitants, sweeping with them 
many smaller forms, such as the extinct deer and bulls which 
we find buried with them. The unchanged geography of the 
country assures us that no great convulsion of nature 
brought it about. The similarity of the vegetation of the 
elephant period, with that now growing on the same soil, 
shows pretty conclusively that it was not due to great geo- 
graphical changes of other regions reacting on the climate 
of the region they inhabited. It is not meant to assert that 
no changes of climate have taken place; on the contrary, 
such changes have most likely come about; but they have 
hardly been sufficient to extinguish animals so well adapted as 
the Zlephas primigenius undoubtedly was to brave climatic 
irregularities.* There seems but one other way to explain 
the extirpation of these races and that is through the action 
of man. There is no longer any doubt that our ancestors 
of the stone age, on the European continent, were ushered on 
to earth in the midst of the gigantie animals of the elephant 
riod. It is now over thirty years since Schmerling of Liege 
presented the evidence of the contemporaneity of the remains 
of man with those of the cave bear and other extinct ani- 
mals. Step by step the evidence has accumulated, over- 
whelming the determined opposition of those who think that 
the truth they have is necessarily damaged by all new dis- 
coveries. It is impossible to present here the evidence 
which supports what may seem to many a too confident as- 
.sertion; its character is known to most readers. Bones of 
these extinct animals, split for marrow and worked for tools, 
are probably the most important part of the evidence. But 
the most unquestionable bit of proof is that which is fur- 
nished by a fragment of a tusk of an elephant in the collec- 
far from a change from warmth to cold having been the cause of the extinction 
of the fossil elephants which have recently disappeared from the Mississippi Valley, 
at all, it likely acted by an alteration from cold to warmth, giving a climate too hot for 
a creature probably clothed as we know the Lena elephant to have been, 
* 
